Mother Pluto

Director: David Hand
Release Date: November 14, 1936
Stars: Pluto
Rating: ★★★
Review:

Pluto unwillingly starts a career as a mother to a number of chicks.

When he finally has learned to love them, their real mother returns and together with her husband, a violent rooster, tries to chase Pluto away.

Although introduced as such, ‘Mother Pluto’ is not really a Silly Symphony. It lacks both the obligate music and the fairy tale character typical of the series. It’s actually Pluto’s first solo outing. It seems that at the time Disney didn’t dare to introduce new series besides the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies. But with Mickey giving way more and more to his co-stars Goofy, Donald and Pluto, this step would soon be made.

At the end of 1937 Pluto would become the first Mickey Mouse co-star to start his own series with ‘Pluto’s Quin-Puplets’, immediately followed by Donald with ‘Donald’s Ostrich’. Goofy followed one-and-a-half year later, in 1939, with ‘Goofy and Wilbur’. These three stars would be heading most of the Disney shorts of the 1940s and 1950s when the Silly Symphony series had been dropped and the number of Mickey Mouse shorts diminished.

Watch ‘Mother Pluto’ yourself and tell me what you think:

This is Silly Symphony No. 64
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Country Cousin
To the next Silly Symphony: More Kittens