The Simple Things

Director: Charles Nichols
Release Date: April 18, 1953
Stars: Mickey Mouse, Pluto
Rating: ★★★½
Review:

‘The Simple Things’ was to be Mickey’s and Pluto’s last theatrical cartoon (Pluto’s own series had stopped two years earlier).

Unfortunately it is a rather uninspired goodbye. The cartoon returns to the elongated situation comedy of the thirties. There are only two plots here, which hardly build up to a finale. First: Pluto’s encounters with a humanized clam and second, Mickey and Pluto’s fight with a hungry seagull. Both parts are executed routinely, without inspiration.

This makes ‘The Simple Things’ a sad ending to a career that started so phenomenally well, changing the course of animation, 25 years earlier. It would take Mickey another thirty years to return to the movie screen in ‘Mickey’s Christmas Carol‘ from 1983. Meanwhile, Mickey & Pluto director Charles Nichols would direct three Donald Duck cartoons, and one special, ‘The Saga of Windwagon Smith‘, before leaving Disney for Hanna-Barbera in 1962.

Watch ‘The Simple Things’ yourself and tell me what you think:

This is Mickey Mouse cartoon No. 125
To the previous Mickey Mouse cartoon: Pluto’s Christmas Tree
To the next Mickey Mouse cartoon: Mickey’s Christmas Carol