Many years ago, I knew a woman who had racetrack rescue greyhounds. She made them little wool coats, which they wore when she took them to outdoor events in inclement weather. These were desert-dwelling animals by breeding, after all, not prepared to deal with a Pacific Northwest winter. Or even a Pacific Northwest summer, some years. I was perfectly okay with this. They were essentially blankets that strapped on. The dogs were free to move, and the coats kept them warm. This is essentially the only time I’ve really been okay with animals in clothing.

Minnie, meanwhile, has knitted an actual bodysuit for Pluto. I genuinely have no idea how you’d even put this thing on a dog. It covers his whole body except his head, tail, and paws. She sends him outside in it, and he is far from pleased. He spends quite a lot of the short trying to get the thing off, because it’s uncomfortable and itchy and honestly humiliating. He hides from the other dogs. And Pluto has just enough sentience, by Disney standards to feel humiliation and want nothing to do with this sweater.

Now, on the one hand, we could be talking about this short because we had snow here, and there’s snow out there. However, I’ve actually been promising to get to this one for some time now, because it’s one of the shorts where Figaro of Pinocchio is Minnie’s pet cat. Why? Because. Historically, there has been almost no overlap in animation between the shorts and the features. Yes, you get characters from both wandering around the parks, and clips from both end up on the clip shows, but until quite recently, every movie was its own thing, and the shorts lived in their own universe. Almost.

Willie the giant has shown up once or twice, I think, and after all the short there is “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” which is another one of those “excised from its movie of origin and made a short” deals. And it’s true that the feature in question did have Jiminy Cricket in it. He became kind of a “when you don’t want to use Mickey” character—running about the Disney films as a general narrator and dispenser of wisdom. It’s helped, I suppose, by the fact that Jiminy Cricket is generally shown as small enough not to be noticed, so he can be actually in whatever you want him in and have it be reasonable that the characters don’t see him.

But Figaro is the only animated movie character to have been borrowed whole cloth and moved into the world of the shorts. This isn’t “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” though even that, now I come to think about it, mostly only borrows characters from Mr. Toad. No mention is ever made of Gepetto in these shorts. Everyone always acts as though Figaro has always been there and has lived no other life. Honestly, I think he has to have been resized, though the size of Disney characters is its own discussion.

Walt, you see, is long believed to have given his approximate idea of Mickey’s height, which was extremely tall, for a mouse. The shorts are populated with dogs and a cow and a horse and ducks and so forth, and while there are three basic heights for characters, that also means that one of the dogs is as tall as the horse and that the mouse is the size of the ducks. Children are the same size regardless of species. Figaro is, in this short, about the same size relative to Minnie as a kitten would be to my kids. Admittedly I have tall kids. Still, we’re looking at a very tall mouse, too.

Why Figaro? Why not the kitten who appears in at least one other short and isn’t Figaro? Even stranger, Fifi—Minnie’s own dog—disappeared at roughly the same dog, and another character, “Dinah the Dachshund,” was created to be Pluto’s love interest. I’m sure they were playing on the “natural” rivalry between cats and dogs, long a cartoon staple. We’d later get a pair of vaguely Siamese cats named Milton and Lucifer—who is not the Lucifer from Cinderella—one of whom eventually became Mickey’s pet cat. In short, I don’t know why Figaro, either.

As for that sweater, I don’t mean to shame Minnie’s knitting ability. I can’t knit at all, so any knitting is better than what I can do. That much is certainly true. But honestly, if your pet needs a coat, and you don’t have a reason to be outside, just keep your pet inside. My cat’s asleep on my bed right now rather than showing the slightest interest in going out into the six or so inches of snow. (I haven’t been outside, either.) She’s upset about how little appreciation Pluto shows for her work, but I’m sure he’d rather a nice, soft blanket to snuggle in when he comes back inside. The yard isn’t fenced, either, and that’s not safe.

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And for a bonus, here’s how weird that thing looks as well as an example of how weird Disney anatomy can be!