“Pluto and the Armadillo”

Alas, most of the most bonkers stills from this cartoon would take more going through than I’m usually willing to do. The animation of ‘40s Disney cartoons could be more experimental than even I necessarily remember, but for some reason some of the weirdest imagery comes from the Pluto shorts. I suppose that’s mostly because, for the most part, they are what I consider “mute” cartoons. They’re not silent; they have a synchronized soundtrack. But mostly it’s score and Pluto’s barks. In general the cartoons don’t need their soundtrack to be pretty much the same. There’s only so much you need to get all the gags.

Pluto and Mickey are getting off a plane in Belém, Brazil, a hundred kilometers up the Amazon from the coast. They are on their way to Rio. Mickey throws Pluto’s ball, which then gets lost in the rain forest. (Because Mickey is a bad pet owner.) Pluto goes to look for it, but naturally, his ball, when rolled up, looks like an armadillo. This causes great consternation to Pluto, because armadillos are not part of his natural environment.

The short was originally intended to be in Saludos Amigos, and goodness knows there was room for it. Disney lists Saludos Amigos as a feature, but IMDb calls it a short, given it’s 42 minutes long. (By Academy rules, it’s a feature by two whole minutes.) Either way, there would have been room for the proposed segment in a Brazilian zoo plus this short, and I don’t know why they weren’t included. I kind of suspect they were more concerned about making sure they kept a full array of shorts instead of having the movie be ten minutes longer or so when that still wouldn’t have made it over an hour.

Honestly, Pluto’s lucky he has Mickey, neglectful though Mickey is. There is the obligatory moment where he thinks he’s killed the armadillo—he has instead destroyed his ball—and it’s actually effective. Pluto is distraught and bursts into tears. Now, I don’t know if he could’ve eaten the armadillo; I am not an expert on the subject by any stretch. What I do know is that . . . well, among other things, he’s not bright enough to realize that destroying an armadillo would leave bits. This is not an animal ready to live in the wild.

Is Disney ready for a lecture about invasive species? Nah, not really. I will say that, while I’m not an expert on armadillos (a tiny amount of research shows that there are far more species of them than I realized), they don’t seem to be threatened at all. They weren’t likely to be threatened in the ‘40s, either. Still, I’m not sure Mickey planned to go through the work to import one to the US, though I’m also sure it would’ve been easier in those days. And this is the kind of thing that goes through my mind when I watch Pluto shorts. Pray for me.