It lasts just a little more than a minute, but the famous “flypaper sequence” that concludes the Mickey Mouse cartoon Playful Pluto, which was released on this day in 1934, remains one of the most influential animations of all time. The dazzling sequence, from the hand of William Norman “Norm” Ferguson, the primary animator of the witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as well as our capricious canine, shows a lithe, elastic, and increasingly annoyed Pluto engaged in battle with a seemingly innocent sheet of floating flypaper that, despite Pluto’s hilarious protestations to the contrary, proceeds to alight on almost every part of the increasingly perturbed pooch’s body. It’s a scene that caught the eyes of Disney Legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, who wrote in their classic 1981 book Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, that the sequence represents a “milestone in personality animation. Through it all, [Pluto’s] reaction to his predicament and his thoughts of what to try next are shared with the audience. It was the first time a character seemed to be thinking on the screen, and, though it lasted only 65 seconds, it opened the way for animation of real characters with real problems.” Ferguson, who died in 1957, was posthumously inducted as a Disney Legend in 1999.
