Mickey's Fire Brigade

The opening shot is a diagram of the cast. A hook-and-ladder truck tore toward a hotel fire with Mickey at the wheel, Donald up on the stacked ladders shouting the word fire over and over, and Goofy at the back steering the trailer. Driver, alarm, and tail: that is the trio, in the exact roles the studio would give them for the next several years. Mickey did the sensible thing, Donald made noise, and Goofy handled the part of the vehicle that could go wrong.

Mickey's Fire Brigade was released August 3, 1935, through United Artists, the seventy-seventh Mickey Mouse short and the sixth of the year. Ben Sharpsteen directed. It was also in three-strip Technicolor, which the Mickey series had adopted only that year, after the Silly Symphonies had been in color since 1932. Fire is the obvious subject for a studio newly able to draw in orange, and the film made the most of it: the flames were the fourth character, and in several stretches the most active one.

What separates the mid-1930s trio films from the barnyard ensembles of 1931 is that each of the three reacted to the same disaster in a different key. The premise was that they were terrible at the job, but they were terrible in ways specific to who they were.

• Mickey: competent in intention, undone by circumstance. He is the one who still believes procedure will work.
• Donald: loud, fast, and outraged that the fire will not obey him. Clarence Nash's voice does half the work.
• Goofy: slow, cheerful, and structurally useful, which is why he ended the rescue scene as a battering ram.

This division of labor was new. In the early Mickeys the supporting cast were extras with instruments. Here the star was a straight man with two comedians attached, and the film was written so that the comedians got the mishaps. It is the arrangement that would carry the trio through Moving Day, Clock Cleaners and Lonesome Ghosts over the following two years, and Mickey's Fire Brigade is where it looks fully worked out for the first time.

The middle of the film belongs to the building. The fire and the smoke behaved as if they had intentions, dodging the hose, mocking the men sent to fight them, and treating the hotel as a playground. This was the studio's favorite device of the period, the hostile environment that fights back, and it had been maturing since the days when a piano bit Mickey in 1929. The difference in 1935 was that the environment now had character animation of its own. Flames grinned. Smoke thought.

The fire was the fourth character, and in several stretches the most active one.

The animation roster explains why this worked. The credited crew included Bill Tytla, Grim Natwick, Wolfgang Reitherman, Eric Larson and Jack Kinney, along with Fred Spencer, Cy Young, Johnny Cannon and others. Two years later several of these people were on Snow White. Tytla in particular drew weight and force better than anyone at the studio, and a short about fire and water is a good place to look for the muscle that later went into the dwarfs and the demon in Fantasia. A hotel fire is a physics problem, and the film had the staff to solve it convincingly.

The climax is one sustained gag, and it deserves to be laid out in order because the order is the joke. Upstairs, the three found a locked bathroom. Inside was Clarabelle Cow, in the tub, singing to herself, and entirely unaware that the hotel was on fire. Goofy tried to warn her through the transom and failed. Mickey and Donald took the door down using Goofy as the ram. Clarabelle, seeing three strangers burst into her bathroom, drew the natural conclusion that she was being kidnapped, screamed for the police, and went at them with a scrub brush.

So they picked up the bathtub, with her still in it, and shoved it out the window. She sailed through the air, slid down the ladder onto the fire truck, and the three firemen followed her down and landed in the tub, where she resumed hitting them. That is the ending. Nobody put the fire out. The rescue was carried out over the objections of the person being rescued, and the last image was of the rescuers being beaten.

Elvia Allman voiced Clarabelle, and the character is used exactly as she should be: a large, respectable animal whose dignity was the thing at stake. The bathtub sequence is the film's argument in miniature. Competence would have produced no comedy. Three men doing the right thing badly, with the victim fighting them the whole way, produced the best minute in the picture.

Ben Sharpsteen had been an animator on the studio's 1931 shorts, including Mickey's Orphans, and by 1935 was directing. His hand shows in the pacing. The film does not stop to admire its own color, which lesser Technicolor shorts of the period did constantly; it keeps the truck moving, the fire spreading and the trio failing at a steady clip. The scene transitions are functional rather than decorative. It reads as a director who trusted the gags to carry the picture and the color to take care of itself.

Set beside the 1931 Mickeys, the growth is stark. Four years earlier the studio's idea of a short was a band on a stand playing a standard through. Here was a story with a location, three distinct leads, a hostile environment and a payoff that reversed the premise. Bert Lewis scored it. The film reached home video in December 2001 on the Mickey Mouse in Living Color volume of the Walt Disney Treasures line, where it sits among the first color Mickeys as one of the sturdier entries.

It is not a classic, and it does not need to be. The trio films that followed refined the formula, and the ones people remember, Clock Cleaners above all, had better set pieces. Mickey's Fire Brigade is the earlier, plainer version: a solid eight minutes of the studio testing a cast arrangement that turned out to work. The bathtub is the reason to watch it. The truck is the reason to remember it.