Disney’s coyotes don’t have the cultural impact that Warners’ coyote has, of course. In fact, I suspect there are plenty of people who aren’t familiar with them at all. Even I am surprised to discover they have official names. They appeared in a whopping four shorts, and they haven’t much been resurrected for later Disney properties. They aren’t even in the Disney version of Dickensian London, though I suppose coyotes would be out of place in Dickensian London. Still, there it is. They are if anything more obscure than Humphrey the Bear.

Pluto is guarding a campsite in the woods somewhere. The campers have quite sensibly put their food in a food safe hauled high up in a tree. Unfortunately, they’re camping in a Disney cartoon, which means coyotes of far greater sentience than real-world coyotes. Bent-Tail and his son, Bent-Tail Junior, smell the food and decide they’re going to get it. Yes, they’re in conflict with Pluto over that, but when you’re in conflict with Pluto, what matters is whether the cartoon is from your perspective or not.

We never actually see whose camp it is. We see them at a distance, canoeing on a moonlit river. They appear, in that shot, to be human; certainly we don’t see large, round ears or prominent bills or what have you. My son demanded to know where Mickey was, because Pluto should be with people, which is interesting to think about. He’ll be nine in a few days and didn’t see the conflict between “Mickey Mouse” and “people.” However, we have no way of knowing exactly whose camp it is or how Pluto ended up guarding it.

What we do know is that Pluto is in the coyotes’ space. He thinks of it as his, but let’s be real, here. It isn’t. He is in the woods. Probably in the Sierra Nevadas somewhere, given the location of the Disney studios. So he has come to the mountains—it’s definitely the mountains—and is keeping wild animals from eating food in their actual habitat. So that’s definitely a metaphor for something, and the fact that I’m pretty sure this was during the era when Walt was contemplating a mountain resort is worth talking about it right now.

My favourite character here is Bent-Tail Junior. I’ve always been fond of him. He trots peacefully through Disney cartoons, admittedly not many of them, and worries equally about his father and Pluto. Which is to say not at all. I deeply regret that there aren’t more cartoons with him, because he’s wonderful and I can’t imagine that there are no funny ideas involving him. Someday, I’ll put together a least of the most under-used Disney characters by order of how much fun they are relative to the Big Three.

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