200. Three For Breakfast

SERIES: DONALD DUCK

RELEASED: 1948

DIRECTOR: Jack Hannah

STORY: Nick George

Donald has made himself a tall stack of pancakes for breakfast when Chip and Dale sneak into his kitchen and begin stealing them one by one. A brief war ensues as Donald tries to rid his home of the pests. In the process, some rubber cement spills on the gridle, making a very stretchy “pancake.” Donald uses it to prank the chipmunks, but things turn on him in the end.

Chip n’ Dale had appeared in a few shorts prior to this one. This is their second pairing with Donald Duck, and it’s a nice evolution of their characters as well as their relationship with Donald as antagonists, which would last throughout the rest of the 1940s and into the 1950s. The personalities of each chipmunk is becoming more clear here, with Chip the more talkative leader and Dale obviously the dimwitted one. Perhaps the company saw Dale as a way to recreate the fun of Dopey in the shorts, as Dale is often the lovable quiet one. Dale also gains his distinguishing red nose here (it had appeared in the title card for “Chip an’ Dale”, but not in the actual cartoon).

Many, many Donald Duck cartoons open with him humming or singing a song of some sort. Here, he first appears singing “Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortening Bread”, which had been sung by Willie the Whale a couple years earlier in the feature Make Mine Music. I love what Oliver Wallace does with it in the music score of the cartoon, as he continues the melody and bends it to the mood of the chipmunk peeking in the window. The music in this short stood out to me. It was not intrusive, but clever and serving the gags well, right down to the “Asian” sound of the gag at the end. 

There are a few fun moments with the chipmunks interacting with the items on Donald’s kitchen table. These recall prior Silly Symphonies, particularly “The Country Cousin” and “Three Little Kittens”. Perhaps there’s even a dash of “Mickey and the Beanstalk”. Seeing small characters manipulating giant silver is always funny, I guess. But there is also a wonderful little moment when Dale spills the salt, and he stops to throw some over his shoulder. Little touches like that really add charm to the proceedings. There’s an added comic absurdity to human superstitions being mimicked by chipmunks, particularly as he should have no knowledge of such things. 

I love the animation of the pancakes on the end of the fork, being pulled to the chipmunks. They are drawn in such a way as to appear to be walking. This is something that can only work in cartoons, and Disney (particularly in this period), does a lot with making inanimate objects suddenly have “life” in moments like this. 

Apparently Donald hasn’t learned his lesson from “Chef Donald” to keep the lid on his rubber cement and keep it out of the kitchen. But where that cartoon played at Donald’s expense, Donald is here using the accident to his advantage. In a way, it recalls the prior cartoon and now Donald has knowledge from it that he can use. But of course, the tables turn on him again in the end. I like the brief “floor plan” shots of Donald stretching the “pancake” all throughout his house. There are several other nice layout choices throughout, like when Dale is backing into the fork. Remember that every time there’s a different “shot” in a cartoon, each is carefully planned out ahead of time and sometimes an entirely new background needs to be painted just for that one gag. The amount of work that goes into something like this, particularly in the age when everything was done by hand, astounds me sometimes.

There is a bit of a strange moment when Donald finally falls off the roof. He screams with the well-known Goofy scream “Aaaa -hoo-hoo-hooey!” In Disney cartoons this was becoming as ubiquitous as the Wilhelm Scream in movies is today. But it still feels strangely incongruous coming out of Donald’s mouth, and I think it was a mistake. 

The final visual gag is not perhaps “politically correct” today, but it’s worth noting and remembering that in this instance the joke is not on Asian people, but on Donald. The humor comes from how silly Donald looks, not how silly Asian people look. Dale is mocking Donald and the fact he looks like a stereotype; he is just having a joke on people. Chip and Dale don’t work that way; they mock what’s right in front of them. It may rub some modern viewers the wrong way, but I suggest you just laugh and let it go.  There are other shorts with far more obvious racism than this one.

This isn’t the best Chip and Dale short, but it serves as a solid interaction with Donald Duck. Usually these shorts are about Donald invading their property and them fighting back, but this one plays the reverse of that. It’s also easier to forgive this one as it was released before the Donald vs. Chipmunks thing had been overdone. I think it works well enough and the sight of the walking pancake always amuses me.

Just what is the Disney Shorts Project?

Several years ago, I got to wondering what I would consider the top 100 Disney animated short subjects of all time. I thought it might be fun to do my own list. So I got to watching, and now I'm finally ready to share my thoughts. Over time though, I realized there were so many cartoons that I loved that maybe 100 was not enough. So I've expanded the final tally to 200. Boiling down over 500 short subjects to the best of the bunch was not easy!

How did this come about? First things first: I sat down and watched every single animated short in chronological order from "Steamboat Willie" to "Get a Horse!" I kept a little sheet with me and gave a check mark to shorts that I immediately wanted to consider for the top 100, and another for ones I liked a lot and would have to evaluate again. When that first pass was done, I had about 75 definites, and 250 or so "likes". I then watched those "likes" a second time and ranked them, eliminating the bottom 75 or so. Finally, I went through once again and watched all the remaining shorts to make the final rankings.

What shorts are eligible for the list? In my first pass, I included all the educational shorts that I could find, as well as direct-to-video stuff. In finalizing the list, I decided that I'd have to set some rules for what could make the list:

1) No educational shorts. This means no "The Story of Menstruation" or any of those. A few were considered eligible if they had wide theatrical release accompanying a feature. These include "Scrooge McDuck and Money" and the Goofy "Freewayphobia" shorts. Other "documentary"-style shorts are eligible ("Donald in Mathmagic Land", "It's Tough to Be a Bird"), but there are many other shorts made specifically by the educational division of the studio that were excluded. The "What Would You Do?" series is wonderful, but I had to exclude it.

2) All shorts must be made by Walt Disney Animation Studios or its equivalent. That is, by Walt's main animation team and for theatrical distribution. Nothing made by the TV animation division is eligible save a few exceptions. So no "I'm No Fool" stuff. The lone exceptions are shorts made by the TV division that got either theatrical distribution (the Bonkers short "Petal to the Metal"), or played festivals that got them Academy Awards attention ("Redux Riding Hood"). I also included the Rick Reinert stuff, though I don't think any of it made the final list.

3) All shorts, with few exceptions, must have screened theatrically. Even if it was made by the feature animation department, if it premiered on television (Prep & Landing) it was not included. Likewise, direct-to-DVD shorts like "The Cat That Looked at a King" were excluded. However, I made an exception for the pieces created for the abandoned Fantasia World project, some of which ended up only as DVD extras. Since some garnered Oscar attention, all were made by the Feature Animation department, and all were intended for one feature, I treated them all equally.

4) Only shorts originally made and released as shorts were included. No segments are sequences that originated as material from the package films ("Casey at the Bat", "Peter and the Wolf", etc.) were eligible, even though many were subsequently released on their own in the 1950s. This also includes the Goofy short "How to Ride a Horse", which was originally part of The Reluctant Dragon and not released separately until 1950.

5) No specialty commercials or promotional materials. So that eliminates "The Volunteer Worker", "Mickey's Surprise Party", "Parade of the Award Nominees", "Steel and America", "Electric Holiday", and others. Also no industrial training films were included.

6) Only animated shorts were eligible, though some have live action elements. I hotly debated whether to remove anything with live-action, but decided as long as at least half of the short was animated it was eligible.

7) No theme park attractions. So that means no "Circle of Life: An Environmental Fable" or "Mickey's Philharmagic".

I think that covers all the basic guidelines I followed in eliminated shorts.

Okay, but by what criteria did you rank them? Basically, if they were supposed to be funny and they made me laugh out loud, that was a positive right away. I decided it was important to judge each on its own merit, and for its time. It is unfair to compare "The Skeleton Dance" to "Tangled Ever After" in terms of animation. I tried to judge each short by its sophistication in terms of story and technology for its time, and take that into account when ranking them. Judging them for their time also means not immediately docking them for racial or ethnic caricatures. It would be myopic to throw out the best of these because we have a different sensibility now. Also, sometimes first appearances of iconic characters lent extra weight to a short's ultimate ranking. In essence, I considered all aspects of each piece (the color, the animation, the backgrounds, the music, the time of its release) as I judged them. Some of them I have great nostalgic affinity for. Many of these still amused me enough to make the cut, and some I had to let go. Just know that for every short that made it, there was another that just missed.

This list is of course entirely subjective, no matter how much I may try to look at things objectively. You may have favorite shorts that you don't end up seeing here. Believe me, of the 500+ cartoons I watched at least 350 were ones I enjoy and could be contenders. There are honestly very few that I don't think very highly of in some fashion. And just know that I have favorite cartoons that didn't make the list either! Furthermore, my rankings for many of them have changed throughout the course of this project. But the general sense of where most of them end up has stayed pretty consistent. But if you say, "How could you rank that so low?" Realize that I may have gone back-and-forth on it, and the final ranking is a little fluid.

I also made a decision not to include "Feast" in this ranking because to date I have seen it only once and I felt there was something nice about just going from Mickey Mouse in 1928 to Mickey Mouse in 2013. But it was an enjoyable short and maybe I'll post an essay about it later.

Finally, I must add that despite my best efforts to find them, there were a few shorts that I was unable to view, and thus could not be eligible for this list. Some have never been commercially available past their initial screening and if I never saw them, I cannot judge them. These shorts are:
Oilspot and Lipstick
Lorenzo
Glago's Guest
Tick Tock Tale

Thanks for reading this introduction, and I hope you enjoy taking this journey with me through the very best of the animated shorts that Disney has made!