Topolino contro i gatti

Apparently, Mickey and his comrades are members of the Confederacy, but they don't seem to be fighting the union. The enemy is a herd of cats that seem to be like Nazi's. Although the time period is a bit off. Anyway, the two forces come together and the mice seem to have the upper hand, even though the cats are enormous. Of course, they are also stupid.

The Barnyard Battle (1929)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

A war is about to break out so Mickey Mouse goes down to enlist. Once he gets approved he finds himself on the front lines going up against a large cat. THE BARNYARD BATTLE is one of the best of the early Mickey shorts as it contains some great animation, a wonderful score and plenty of funny action. The action mostly takes places on the battlefield where the animation really gets the shine because of all the stuff going on from mice running around to cannonballs flying. Another highlight happens towards the end when Mickey must get creative to knock off some of the bad guys (a trick used in an earlier Walt Disney film). If you're a fan of Mickey Mouse or animation from this era then THE BARNYARD BATTLE is certainly a classic and a must-see. The film runs a very quick seven minutes and there's really not a dry moment to be found.

Mickey joins the army, and the mice fight the cats!

Relatively slow paced in my opinion.

Strange like many of the early Mickey cartoons, though interesting!

Some amazing perspective shots which clearly mark the work as a product of Ub Iwerks' incredible mind!

Some clever gags, my favourite being Mickey running out of machine gun bullets and using piano keys instead, to musical effect!

Musical Mickey almost always seems to have a handy piano at hand!

I think the best thing about this is the wonderful pastoral world of early Mickey Mouse. The universe, though sometimes scary, is wonderful all the same. This also makes me see what people are talking about when they say that the early Mickey Mouse cartoons have very insubstantial two-dimensional characters at best. In my opinion, Steamboat Willie was great, The Karnival Kid even greater, and everything else I've seen from this era really pales in comparison! The Karnival Kid is just such an incredible outlier for such an early work (only the ninth animated Mickey Mouse cartoon, just two after this one), it's strange to me that it took so long to reach that level of quality once again. I've honestly never seen one better, though for reference, I still have not seen any Mickey Mouse cartoon beyond 1933! I await what's ahead with excitement!

6.7/10.

This was a well made but rather morally dubious cartoon from the early days of Mickey Mouse. Like most of these early films, they are in black and white and feature sound effects and occasional voices, but are (for the most part) like a silent film with added sound effects.

The film begins with Mickey and his fellow mice all running to volunteer for a war against the....well,...whatever those other Pete-like characters are supposed to be. Oddly, the mice all dance to "Dixie" and wear Confederate-style uniforms while the enemy wore helmets that looked like WWI Germans. Why they were fighting is uncertain but it sure looked fun...and very violent. For 1929, this played pretty well but today it felt a bit unsavory--with the allusions to the South and the way it portrayed war as great fun! It's probably a film you best watch with and explain to your younger kids, but as an adult I enjoyed and appreciated the artistry of the film--Disney Studios was miles ahead of the competition in quality.

In this short, Mickey Mouse plays a soldier whose farm is being attacked by an army of cats led by Pete (who else?). I believe that this short is supposed to take place during WWI, which ended 11 years before it came out. In fact this cartoon was at one time banned in Germany because the Germans thought that the helmets the cats wore were insulting to German national dignity. One thing that was interesting was that all the soldiers looked like Mickey. This usually happens in the Goofy shorts (where all the characters seem to look like Goofy).