“Merbabies”

I’m frankly shocked that this is on Disney+. My membership rolls over in a bit over two months (donations to that cause gladly accepted; it’s not cheap), and I will once again be writing an angry article about what’s missing. I’d had hopes that the shorts, at least, were becoming more frequently available, because although there are a lot of them, goodness knows, surely that would mean you could dump a few dozen of them on the service in the time and effort it would take to put up a series from FX or similar. But I’m still routinely in the position of hoping like hell it hasn’t been taken off YouTube.

There is, quite frankly, no plot to this. Completely identical red-headed children with tails, the merbabies of the title, are created I guess from foam. They gambol a bit on the surface, then sounds indicate they should go to the ocean floor. Where there’s a circus parade featuring merbabies and assorted sea creatures. This goes on until some of the merbabies are pushed to the surface again by bubbles and apparently dissolve back into foam.

Which is, uh, a little nihilistic. I know that the original Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid” said that, because they didn’t have souls, mermaids dissolve into foam when they die, but this appears to be even weirder, because Andersen mermaids at least live very long lives, and these merbabies last the length of a cartoon. Really, the vibe it gives off is more “we didn’t know what we wanted to do other than have an undersea circus parade.” They didn’t even get to the actual circus. It’s not even a bunch of stuff that happens; it’s a bunch of stuff going past while nothing much happens.

The short wasn’t even actually made by Disney. It was made by Harman and Ising. They’d loaned Walt animators in the lead-up to Snow White, and I guess this was part of that somehow? I’m not sure. Everyone mentions it, but no one talks much about the details. A little deeper research shows that this was after they’d been fired from MGM for going over budget on their own shorts but before they were hired back to work under Fred Quimby. RKO didn’t want to distribute Harman-Ising shorts, so this is the only one released by them through Disney and RKO.

One of the sites I found about this short says it remains beloved, but did it? I think I picked this one simply because it was a 1938 cartoon from Disney that I hadn’t written about yet. I’m not sure I remembered anything about it. I’m not sure if I’d even seen it or not. Surely I must have, given my heavily Disney childhood, but this isn’t one of the Silly Symphonies I’d name when going through the series mentally. All I’m saying is that it’s not exactly “The Old Mill.”