Le jardin de Mickey

Particularly interesting in this short is a sequence where Mickey gets extra-strength bug spray sprayed in his own face and then trips. He thinks the plants and bugs have grown, and tries to escape the terrorizing insects. I love the weird ways the bugs attack him and Pluto! This is a fabulous cartoon. 9/10.

A Walt Disney MICKEY MOUSE Cartoon.

Strange things start to happen in MICKEY'S GARDEN when the Mouse is hit with a dose of his own super-potent bug spray.

This highly imaginative little cartoon almost becomes a horror film, what with its menacing menagerie of mini-monsters chasing Mickey & Pluto. Excellent use of Technicolor throughout. That's a Chaplin spoof Mickey performs at one point with the assistance of a snake. Walt Disney provides the Mouse with his squeaky voice.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by pictures & 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 storm of naysayers, 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 always pay off.

In this cartoon, the second color Mickey adventure, bugs and creepy crawlies are eating absolutely everything in Mickey's yard. He and Pluto set out on a mission to stop them with some poisonous gas, so bad the barrel has a skull and crossbones on it.

After an accident, Mickey ends up spraying himself with the gas and goes on a scary trip in which he is thimble sized and the bugs are as big as T-Rexs.

The rest of the cartoon is a chase with him and Pluto being pursued by the creepy crawlies. It's all very visual stuff, played out to various pieces of music. Mickey doesn't even say a single thing until the last few seconds.

A fun cartoon.

Mickey and Pluto do battle with a horde of insects and bugs that were feasting on Mickey's garden. He sprays them with plenty of insecticide, but that does not deter them (some strong insects to withstand a bug spray). Soon, Mickey gets dizzy from getting the spray onto himself and daydreams of a warped zone where the insects are twice their size.

It's a cartoon that might give you the creepy crawlies and has the usual slapstick action. It's kind of fun seeing how Mickey and Pluto deal with the bugs, but, I didn't find much to laugh about, if not at all. Nothing really funny here. Kids might like it, but there are definitely better cartoons out there featuring Mickey and Pluto.

Grade C-

Disney had a fondness for bizarre sequences involving hallucinations, and when Mickey gets a face full of bug spray the screen is soon swarming with enormous insects and giant trembling vines for the rest of the film...