L'art du camping

A Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon.

Mickey & Minnie, Horace Horsecollar & Clarabelle Cow are having great fun CAMPING OUT together - until they are attacked by a horrible swarm of ferocious mosquitoes.

This is an enjoyable little black & white film, with good animation & pacing. And what viewer cannot sympathize with the anxiety of dealing with a deadly insect menace? The animators have indulged in a large number of their favorite posterior gags. Horace & Clarabelle are very effective in their larger-than-usual roles. They were two seasoned performers with years of experience on the vaudeville stage and in early cinema, but they would eventually find themselves supplanted at Disney by newcomers Pluto, Goofy & Donald Duck.

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 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 simplicity of message and lots of hard work always pay off.

It all begins witch Mickey Mouse, Minnie, Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar having fun camping outside and making music then we see that Clarabelle is making a cake, until some nasty mosquitoe arrives and starts causing mayhem around Mickey's fun day by stinging them and that made me angry because that animal was making the four guys lives a living hell but he gets karma for his actions when he gets defeated by Horace and flies sadly and tells his pop that he was just having fun and i was like does he thinks annoying these animals is fun? I don't think so, then the other mosquitoes decide to take revenge on Mickey and his friends by runing their lives like he did before but the good thing is that in the end all those annoying bugs get karma for their actions they enter inside a pant, horace kicks them out and they ran away in fear and this how the short ends with four animals celebrating the victory after defeating those mosquitos and there's the reason why the mosquitos are the real villains in this short.

Camping Out is not quite the very finest of Disney or up there as one of them, but I sure was entertained by it. Some may argue that the short was not very original, actually considering that it doesn't involve just song-and-dance, battles with Pete and Mickey rescuing Minnie I thought it was. Also when you think of the gang initially you'd immediately think of Mickey, Goofy and Donald(and perhaps Pluto), but here it's Mickey, Minnie, Horace and Clarabelle. I as well did identify with the situation, I've had my fair share of problems with bugs on our family camping holidays. The animation is crisp and clean with some nice shadings and the characters drawn well. The music is just wonderful, one of my favourite scores of any of the Disney shorts actually, and seeing how much the music does for them, always enhancing the gags and action, that is saying a lot. This was especially true with the music that opens Camping Out. The voice work is good. But it was the gags and one character that stood out that really made Camping Out work. The gags, revolving around the idea of mosquitoes attacking and the gang repelling them, are non-stop and literally two or three laughs a minute, setting the tone for a light-hearted but constantly funny battle. The standouts were when the mosquitoes lift Horace off the ground when he opens an umbrella to shield himself from the onslaught, and when the mosquitoes were stinging his behind and Horace takes advantage of the situations and tricks them with a waffle iron. The only reason why I am not mentioning all of them is that there are so many it would be impossible to list within the word limit, and I also want to talk about the character who stood out. Mickey, Minnie and Clarabelle are all likable characters and have their good moments, but unusually and interestingly the best character was Horace. Not only does he have the best gags and the most he's had to do to date(mostly it's a couple of brief appearances or something), but he here has a personality that makes him much more than the stereotyped horse he is in other cartoons but makes him think of himself as a man and his mild temper or sense of humour can build to consequences. One does wish that he and Clarabelle had more to do instead of vanishing into oblivion for a while before the show House of Mouse resurrected them. I also loved the relationship between the gang, you can really tell that they are friends and you feel it. All in all, a brilliant short. 10/10 Bethany Cox

Mickey, Minnie, Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow are on a camp-out and found themselves doing battle with a horde of invading mosquitoes. The high-pitch noise of the flying pests is enough to make anyone shiver, and you feel for our heroes when they get bitten by them.

There are plenty of humor and comic relief, from Mickey accidentally ruining Horace's cake to Clarabelle putting clips on the mosquitoes' noses. The tactics Mickey, Minnie, Horace and Clarabelle use against the bugs were entertaining to watch and, just when you think the antagonists make the best out of the characters (like in many other cartoon shorts), our heroes actually got the upper hand!

Great and funny stuff here - one of the best Disney cartoons!

Grade A