Mischievous Mice Review: Six Minutes of Rubbery, Dusty Chaos

Skip this entirely if you need things like "plots" or "dialogue" to enjoy a film. But if you have six minutes to spare and love dusty, crackly old cartoons, Mischievous Mice is a pretty fun watch. 🐭

It is basically just a bunch of rubbery little rodents running absolute circle around a very stressed cat. Kids today will probably find the black-and-white scratchiness a bit boring, but animation nerds will love the bouncy rhythm of it all.

Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising made this back when background art was mostly just gray smudges and characters did not really have bones. The way the main cat moves is honestly kind of mesmerizing, like his legs are made of wet spaghetti.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Mischievous Mice (1934) through its definitive frames.

There is some weird choices here that made me laugh out loud. At one point, a mouse gets flattened by a rolling pin, and instead of showing him pop back up, the camera just cuts to him suddenly being fine and eating cake. 🍰

It has that same loose, slightly chaotic energy you find in other early shorts like Playful Pan. Nobody was trying to make art here; they just wanted to see how many silly movements they could draw before the deadline.

Some weird details I wrote down:

• The cat's tail seems to have its own brain and wiggles even when he is completely frozen.
• The music is incredibly loud and does not really match what is happening on screen half the time.
• One mouse wears pants but the others are completely naked, which raises some unanswered questions. 👖

There is a specific moment where three mice do a little synchronized dance on a block of cheese. It goes on for way too long, but you can tell the animators were just really proud they got the loop to sync up.

It is not a masterpiece, and the sound quality is pretty rough on the ears if you turn it up too high. Still, there is a warm, handmade charm to these old shorts that modern CGI just cannot replicate. 🎨