Mickey's Orphans

Start at the end. On November 18, 1932, the Academy handed out its fifth set of awards at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and for the first time there was a category for cartoons. Three films were nominated. Warner Bros. sent It's Got Me Again!, produced by Leon Schlesinger. Walt Disney sent two: Flowers and Trees, the first Silly Symphony in three-strip Technicolor, released through United Artists, and Mickey's Orphans, a black-and-white Christmas short from the previous December, released through Columbia. Flowers and Trees won. Mickey's Orphans became a footnote in its own studio's triumph.

The loss was not close, and it was not unjust. Flowers and Trees was a technical event; Mickey's Orphans was a very good version of something the studio had been doing for four years. But the nomination tells you what the industry thought a Mickey cartoon was for in 1932: a reliable, tightly built comedy, the kind of picture you could put up against anything. It was the first Mickey Mouse short ever nominated, and it earned that by being unusually well organized rather than by being new.

Released December 5, 1931, the thirty-sixth Mickey short and the twelfth of a punishing year, the film opens on a snowy doorstep. A hooded figure leaves a basket and vanishes. Inside are kittens, many more than a basket should hold, and Mickey and Minnie take them in with the sentimental goodwill the season demands. That goodwill lasts roughly as long as it takes the kittens to get down onto the floor.

The structure from there is a single idea, escalated. Mickey puts on a Santa suit and hands out presents. The presents are tools. The kittens use the tools on the house. Every gift Mickey gives is a weapon the film has planted, and the pleasure is watching the studio think through the logic of its own joke: what happens to a Christmas tree when it is given to two dozen small animals with saws and hammers.

• The arrival: a hooded stranger, a basket, and a headcount that keeps rising.
• The welcome: Mickey and Minnie as adoptive parents for exactly one scene.
• The presents: Mickey as Santa, distributing toys with sharp edges.
• The demolition: furniture, then the tree, stripped in stages.
• The aftermath: two mice and a dog standing in what is left.

There is no reversal, no lesson, no moment where the kittens redeem themselves. That is the film's nerve. A Christmas cartoon that ends in total property loss, with the victims having brought it on themselves through generosity, is not the seasonal product one expects from this studio. It is closer in spirit to the Oswald and early Mickey pictures, where sentiment existed only to be knocked over.

Mickey's Orphans was not an original. It reworks Empty Socks, an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon Disney made for Winkler Pictures and released on December 12, 1927. In that film Oswald dressed as Santa and visited an orphanage full of kittens, with results that ended in an explosion. Four years later the same crew, minus the rabbit, ran the premise again with a mouse in a house instead of a rabbit in an institution.

For eighty-seven years the original was a rumor and the remake was the only evidence it had existed.

The strange part is that for most of the twentieth century nobody could check. Empty Socks was a lost film. A twenty-five-second fragment sat at the Museum of Modern Art, and that was all. Then in December 2014 an almost complete print, short by about thirty seconds, turned up in the National Library of Norway's archive at Mo i Rana. For eighty-seven years the original was a rumor and the remake was the only evidence it had existed. Reading the two side by side now, the 1931 version is the tighter piece: the orphanage setting has been collapsed into Mickey's own living room, which makes the destruction personal, and the explosion has been replaced with a slower, more legible dismantling.

This kind of recycling was standard at the studio and should not be held against the film. What it does show is how the Disney crew treated their own back catalogue: as a bank of premises, withdrawn and reinvested whenever the schedule tightened.

Pluto had been Mickey's dog for about seven months by this point, since The Moose Hunt in April, and Mickey's Orphans gave him a role that suited his new job: the household's only adult. Pinto Colvig supplied the barks. The kittens, dozens of them, were all voiced by Marcellite Garner, who also voiced Minnie, which means the film's entire chorus of chaos came out of one woman in a recording booth.

The animation credits are a roll call of the staff that would carry the studio into features. Norm Ferguson, who had built Pluto, is there. So are David Hand, Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi and Jack King, all of whom would direct, and Dick Lundy and Hardie Gramatky. A crew of that quality on a seven-minute Christmas gag film explains why the demolition is so easy to read. Every kitten is doing something distinct, the stages of destruction are ordered, and the camera never loses track of what has been broken and what is still standing.

It is tempting to explain the Academy's interest as seasonal sentiment, but nothing in the film supports that. Mickey's Orphans is a machine. It sets up a rule, hands out the means, and then executes the rule with a thoroughness that the earlier Oswald version never managed. The Academy in 1932 was rewarding craft, and the craft here is structural: the film knows exactly what it is going to break and in what order.

It is also, for anyone who prefers their Mickey polite, a useful corrective. The mouse of 1931 was capable of playing straight man to an act of vandalism and coming out of it with nothing but a wrecked house. That version of the character would not last. Within a few years the studio would hand the destructive roles to Donald and the Goof and keep Mickey clean. Mickey's Orphans is one of the last Christmases before that happened.