The Castaway

The circumstances explain most of what ended up on screen. Early in 1931 the studio owed Columbia Pictures another Mickey Mouse short and had very little time to deliver it, so Walt Disney handed Wilfred Jackson a job that amounted to building a cartoon out of animation that already existed. Jackson had been on staff since the Steamboat Willie period and had helped work out the timing method that let drawings keep step with a recorded score, but he had never directed. The Castaway, released on March 27, 1931 as the twenty-seventh Mickey short and the third of that year, was his apprenticeship, and it was conducted in front of paying audiences.

That is the fairest frame for judging it. As a piece of storytelling it barely coheres: Mickey drifts from one encounter to the next with nothing connecting them except the sand. As a record of how a small studio kept a distributor's delivery schedule, it is unusually candid. Nobody bothered to disguise the joins, probably because nobody had the days to spare.

Three stretches of the film, by the account in its own article, came from earlier reels. Laid out side by side they account for a large share of the running time, which is why the short feels less like a story than a compilation with a raft attached to the front.

The consequence is visible in Mickey himself. The lankier, smaller-headed 1929 model of the character sits inside the same seven minutes as the rounder 1931 design, and the two do not match. A theatre audience in 1931 may not have registered it. Anyone watching on a home screen today cannot miss it. When a critic complains that Mickey is drawn inconsistently here, that is not a matter of taste; it is an accurate description of a cartoon with two Mickeys in it.

What makes the film worth filing rather than discarding is the pair of names attached to it. Jackson, having proved he could get a reel out the door on time, kept directing, moved on to the Silly Symphonies, and eventually became one of the studio's principal feature directors, with credits on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the films that followed. The Castaway is the unglamorous first line on that record, and it shows the skill that would define him: keeping timing tight even when the material underneath was borrowed.

The other debut belongs to Frank Churchill, credited here with his first cartoon score. Churchill had joined the studio in 1930; within three years he would write the songs for Three Little Pigs, and by the end of the decade he was scoring Snow White. Here he has the thankless assignment of holding together a set of piano gags that were animated to other people's music. He does it with a light, continuous line of tunes that carries Mickey from the swordfish to the banana tree to the spider to the piano without an obvious break.

The music does the connective work the story refuses to do.

The plot, such as it is, runs like a list. Mickey is adrift on a raft and spots land. A swordfish, not by choice, tows him in. He shakes a banana tree and gets one banana. A spider chases him off. A waterlogged piano rolls up on the tide, which is the closest the film comes to a joke about its own formula: wherever Mickey goes, a keyboard will find him. He plays for three seals. A young tiger tries to help by pounding the keys and gets shooed away. A giant ape arrives, turns out to be a better pianist than Mickey, and smashes the instrument anyway. Mickey squares up, loses his nerve, and dances off. A lion chases him and jumps into a crocodile's open jaws. Mickey ends up on the back of a turtle, swimming out to sea, presumably to be a castaway again next week.

The island is an excuse, and not a fresh one. Mickey plus piano plus an audience of animals had already carried The Opry House, The Jazz Fool and Jungle Rhythm in 1929; by 1931 the studio had staged this concert at least three times. The one gag that lands cleanly, the lion vanishing into the crocodile, was drawn for another picture and cut from it. That is the film's whole predicament in a single shot.

Reception has split along an obvious line. One historian calls it a short built around reused, inferior material; another finds it fun and points to Mickey's cheerfulness under every setback. Both are right, and they are describing the same thing from different distances. Up close the film is a patch job. From a seat in the dark it plays as a brisk, sunny runaround, and Churchill's score papers over more than it should be able to.

Placement hurts it. It arrived ten days after Traffic Troubles, the Burt Gillett short that several writers rate as the best Mickey of 1931, and it is followed by The Moose Hunt. Seen in sequence, The Castaway is the week the studio ran out of time. It was released on home video in December 2004 on the second black-and-white Mickey volume of the Walt Disney Treasures series, which is where most people who know it at all have seen it. Watch it once for the two debuts, then move on.