It’s amazing to me how many Disney shorts are on YouTube, and further how many of them are dubbed into goodness-knows-what-language. Sometimes, I can guess, but not always, and even if I can guess, you know, that doesn’t mean I can understand the language in question. And so my first article written at my new house is not a Donald Duck, Aquatic Sociopath one, because the ones I spotted were all in I suspect German, and while it’s true that you can muddle through a Disney cartoon in German even if you don’t speak it, I wanted one I really did know, not one I just mostly figured out.

So instead, we have a Pluto short I found. Pluto wakes up from his nap and is hungry. His dish is empty, so he decides he is going to dig up one of his bones. Alas for him, a gopher is using his bones as props in its dig, and there is of course a battle between Pluto and the gopher, because of course, and the gopher uses goldenrod as a weapon, as it turns out that Pluto is allergic to goldenrod.

Honestly, that’s a hell of a dig on the part of the gopher. The cutaway view we get into the gopher’s hole makes the dirt look like a layer cake, with a tunnel perhaps six inches below the surface if that. And the interesting thing is that it needs propping at all; after all, gopher tunnels don’t, as a rule. I mean, okay, they can cause quite a lot of damage to crops and things by tunnelling under them, but that’s mostly along the lines of what the gopher is also doing here—eating the crops. Because the gopher doesn’t care about the bones; it cares about the carrots it’s digging up.

Now, personally, I am blessed enough to just not have any allergies. I’m fortunate that way. But it does strike me as odd that a plant to which Pluto is violently allergic is growing next to where he buried his bones. I don’t know a lot about goldenrod, just enough to recognize it by sight, so I don’t know how quickly it grows and how likely it is to have sprouted since Pluto did his burying. I’m pretty sure it’s not something that would have been deliberately planted in a vegetable garden; I’m not sure it’s something that’s ever deliberately planted, in fact, though I’ll admit I don’t care enough to go looking to see if it’s possible to buy the seeds.

One thing this cartoon teaches us is that faces look weird when interrupted mid-sneeze. I went poking around, looking at stills, as is my wont, and while I quickly realized I needed to use the one where it looks like Pluto is gratifying the gopher, there were also any number I briefly looked at from when Pluto was sneezing. His face looked distorted. I think sneezing faces are something where animators are limited by how to make the whole thing look natural, and sneezing is such a weird paroxysm that any place you stop in there is going to look bizarre.

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