The Moose Hunt

Pluto talked. Not often, and not for long, but in The Moose Hunt, released April 30, 1931, Mickey's dog said three things out loud. Lying on his back after Mickey mistook him for a moose and fired, he wailed "Mammy!" in the voice of Al Jolson. Revived, he told Mickey "Kiss me!" And later, with the real animal bearing down on them, he barked out "The moose!" Pinto Colvig supplied all three, along with the moose itself. Aside from one more Jolson gag in Mickey Steps Out a few months later, Pluto never spoke again.

That is a strange fact to begin with, but it is the right one, because the whole interest of The Moose Hunt is watching the studio decide what kind of creature Pluto was going to be. In the spring of 1931 the answer was not settled. The barnyard tradition said every animal could talk, play an instrument, and walk upright. The dog in this film mostly did none of those things, and the three spoken lines read as the last twitches of the old rule before the new one took hold. By the end of the year the studio had chosen. Pluto would think with his face and his nose and keep his mouth shut, and that choice made him the most naturalistic character the studio had.

The dog did not appear from nowhere. Norm Ferguson, credited as the film's animator, had been drawing bloodhounds for the studio since the previous summer, and the character arrived in stages.

The transfer of ownership matters more than the name. As Minnie's dog, Rover was a prop in somebody else's scene. As Mickey's dog, Pluto became half of a double act, and the studio immediately started writing for the pairing. The Moose Hunt even carried over a specific bit from The Picnic, the dog sniffing directly into the camera lens, which suggests the animators knew exactly which parts of the earlier design had worked. The film also reused animation from The Chain Gang, so Pluto's debut was assembled partly from his own prehistory.

The most consequential stretch of the film contains no Mickey at all. For roughly a minute and a half Pluto was left alone in the woods to be distracted: by fleas, by a bird, by a scarecrow that he took for a threat. Nothing was at stake and nothing advanced. Ferguson simply let the dog react to things, and the audience was asked to find that interesting on its own.

Nothing was at stake and nothing advanced, and that was the experiment.

It was. The sequence is the earliest clear instance of a Disney character carrying screen time through personality rather than plot, and the studio spent the rest of the decade building on it. Pluto's later solo films, beginning with Pluto's Quintuplets in 1937, are direct descendants of these ninety seconds. So, less obviously, is the studio's whole approach to pantomime: the idea that a drawn face thinking through a problem was worth watching by itself. Judged as comedy the passage is mild. Judged as a proof of concept it is the most important thing in the picture.

The plot around the dog is thin and does not pretend otherwise. Mickey and Pluto went hunting. Pluto wandered off. Pluto came back carrying a branch, Mickey saw antlers, fired, and spent a long stretch mourning a dog who was perfectly fine and enjoying the attention. The mock death scene is the comic centerpiece and the one place where Pluto's talking is used to real effect; the Jolson wail is funny precisely because a dying dog should not have a catchphrase.

Then an actual moose turned up. It sniffed after Pluto rather than attacking, which is the film's best observation about animals, and only turned hostile when Mickey tried to shoot it. The chase that followed ended with Mickey riding on Pluto's back, using the dog's ears as wings to fly out of reach. Rubber-hose physics, fully intact in 1931, solved the problem the plot could not. It is an ending from the older school of cartoon logic pasted onto a film whose real subject was the newer one.

This was the first of six Mickey hunting cartoons, a line that ran through R'coon Dawg in 1951. None of the later ones introduced anything as durable as what this one did, though several of them were better built as stories.

Contemporary reviewers liked it and did not notice the dog. The notices called it a great little cartoon comedy, praised the synchronization, and promised reliable laughs, which was the standard language for a Mickey short in 1931. Nobody wrote that a supporting character had just been born. That is fair; from inside 1931 there was no reason to think a bloodhound would still be on screen twenty years later.

The film reached home video in December 2004 on the second black-and-white Mickey volume of the Walt Disney Treasures line, and its copyright is due to run out at the start of 2027. It is a slight cartoon with a permanent consequence. If the reels below seem generous for a picture with barely a plot, it is because the plot was never the point. The Moose Hunt exists so that a dog could be looked at for ninety seconds, and the studio was never the same after.