The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 2, Winter 2019 | Page 89

w Disney and Warner Bros. Animation
ans During the Great Depression
1
The early years of the Depression
influenced Disney’s cartoons, however.
Many Mickey shorts still contained fantasy
but were also imbued with warnings
about the rules of the world: “Don’t
be too imaginative, don’t be too inquisitive,
don’t be too willful, or you’ll get
in trouble.” 37 These shorts reinforced
old values of “individual initiative and
enterprise,” which were key in bringing
America out of the Depression. 38
In Mickey’s Follies from 1929, the
mouse represents working-class values
and shows off an ideal working-class life
of work and leisure, pride in labor, and
working hard. This short also sees Mickey
singing words for the first time and
playing his own theme song and dancing
to it. 39 Mickey performs this in the
farm’s talent show and sings of his love
for Minnie in “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo.” He
claims his heart is “down in the chicken
house” with Minnie. In this short,
the two “tossed mechanized life and
inflated capitalism away and returned
to their rural roots.” 40 In their earliest
years, Mickey and Minnie epitomized
the “back to the land” movie genre by
being “a country couple, finding their
adventures among the other creatures of
the farmyard and countryside.” 41
The Fire Fighters, also from 1929,
explores the fantasy of rescue amid everything
burning down along with the
promise of a reward. It was one of the
earliest cartoons to reflect the economic
crisis and the stock market crash with
its tragic animated images of city buildings
on fire and figures falling from the
tops. 42 This rescue and reward fantasy
blots out images of an economy in