Animation Appreciation: The Plowboy (1929)

One of the greatest animated character designs of all time, in my opinion anyway, is Horace Horsecollar's. If the name doesn't ring a bell, a refresher: he was Mickey Mouse's second-banana in the late 1920s-early 1930s, before Goofy and Donald et al. usurped that role. Maybe he didn't want it badly enough. I wasn't there.

Horace's official debut was a 1929 short called The Plowboy. It entered the public domain in 2025, so you may watch it in its entirety without fear of legal repercussions/death right here:

This short was directed by the big bossman himself, Walt Disney, with animation done by Ub Iwerks, Ben Sharpsteen, Jack King, Wilfred Jackson, Burt Gillett and Les Clark. These are all names that will be familiar to the average animation buff. The music was scored by Carl Stalling, as many early Disney cartoons were, which is always funny for me to remember as Stalling would go on to do his best-known work with the Looney Tunes series. The general "sound" you most likely picture in your mind when someone mentions that franchise to you is largely his creation. The Rabbit of Seville, Baby Bottleneck, most of the Roadrunner series... 

I've always been very drawn to Disney's rubberhose era. It's an art style that appeals immensely to me, and the early Mickey shorts and the Floyd Gottfredson comic strips are prime examples of that design sensibility in execution. This particular entry is by no means one of the best, but it contains some nice drawings to look at. Let's look at them, shall we?

(As always, you can click on any given image for a closer look at it.)

This is Minnie Mouse flirting. The next singles' night at your local bar, I urge you to walk around making that face at people. 

This probably wasn't the first cartoon to use this particular visual gag, and it certainly wouldn't be the last, but hell, I like it. It's a little creepy I suppose, but the silliness overshadows that.

Mickey gets licked and makes these faces. This is one of the things I like about this early era of Disney (and this applies to the early era at just about any studio), they're still figuring stuff out. Squash-and-stretch would become one of their trademarks within a few years, but here they're just starting to parse how they'd like to animate that sort of thing. Their process gives us in the audience some great drawings to enjoy. (Reading this over, that last sentence strikes me as potentially sounding sarcastic-- rest assured it is not. I truly love these drawings.)

Horace enters the picture and establishes himself as a presence straight away, getting on Mickey's nerves and not taking the proceedings seriously. His suppressed-laughing animation is a lot of fun.

This title card isn't exclusive to this particular film, but I think it might be my all-time favorite rendering of Mickey Mouse. This was a wonderful design for him. Like I said, I'm just a sucker for the whole rubberhose look, and it fit that franchise perfectly like a four-fingered glove.

That's about it for today! Not a very insightful or in-depth post, but this "Animation Appreciation" series is really just an excuse for me to go through some frames I like in a given work and maybe add some stray useless thoughts. I'd like to spotlight some of the aforementioned Floyd Gottfredson's rubberhose art here someday, I personally feel he was the best artist to work in that style. He was able to give it a sense of volume and form that was rarely matched.