La caravana de Mickey

A Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon.

With Goofy at the wheel, a vacation spent in MICKEY'S TRAILER soon turns into a road trip to terror for The Mouse & Donald Duck.

Here is one of the classic Disney cartoons, full of good humor, keen inventiveness & some genuine hair-raising thrills. The animation is excellent, giving each member of the trio a chance to shine. The animators took obvious delight in showing the trailer's various gizmos & gadgets, all compacted into a very small space. The opening sequence is very clever, with a tiny cottage and its bucolic setting being transmogrified by Mickey into a jalopy, trailer and stinking city dump.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that childlike simplicity of message and lots of hard work will always pay off.

Goofy, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck live in a mobile home. Goofy is the absent-minded driver.

This is a classic Disney cartoon. The colors are bright. The characters are iconic. The animation is pure. It is simple fun at its best.

Disney in the late 1930s did animated shorts like no one else did them. Warner Brothers was after the visual gag and creating continuing characters, while MGM was interested in making visually pretty cartoons and mostly one-shots, with few recurring characters. For Walt Disney, shorts served a couple of primary purposes: one, they kept the Disney name and his principal characters before the public and two, most importantly to Disney, they were a good testing and training ground for new animation techniques, so he could make the feature films as close to perfect as possible. In this short (a fantastic cartoon in its own right), the visual gags are great, but the timing on everything has to be perfect or it won't work. You can see the seeds of things Disney did later in features like Dumbo and Bambi in shorts like Mickey's Trailer, which serve as dry-runs while being great works in and of themselves. Some of the best bits ever done were done for these shorts just to see what worked and what didn't. Magnificently animated. Well worth watching. Most highly recommended.

'Mickey's Trailer (1938)' is a short film in which Mickey, Donald and Goofy get into a spot of bother when their trailer begins to careen uncontrolled down a mountain trail. It's an enjoyable experience filled with inventive sight gags, most of which come from the unconventional mobile home that the trio live in (it features transforming rooms and, even, its very own yard). There are several chuckles throughout and the animation is pleasing to watch. Plus, the characters are as charming as ever. The first two thirds of the piece does lack a proper sense of narrative propulsion; it's more like a series of small set-pieces. However, this isn't really an issue. The final act introduces some proper conflict and wraps itself up with an expected but satisfying gag. It perhaps finishes a little too quickly, but - again - that isn't a big deal. Overall, this is an entertaining time throughout. 7/10.

Mickey owns a remarkable trailer with every modern convenience. The problem here is his driver-our friend Goofy. This is another life or death situation based on handing the most responsible position to this guy. Because of this there is non-stop action. One of the better Mickey cartoons, wonderful for 1938.