The chain gang (1930)

Описание: The Chain Gang is a 1930 Mickey Mouse animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions for Columbia Pictures, as part of the Mickey Mouse film series. It was the twenty-first Mickey Mouse short to be produced, the sixth of that year. It is one of a group of shorts produced by Disney immediately after Ub Iwerks left the studio.

The cartoon was primarily drawn by Norm Ferguson, and featured a pair of bloodhounds, who helped to track down Mickey after his prison escape. Although these dogs were not named, the style in which they were drawn makes them clear forerunners of Pluto, who first officially appeared a few months later in The Picnic. The animation for one of the bloodhound scenes in The Chain Gang was recycled as Pluto in four later cartoons. Additionally, a few scenes contain reused animation from the Oswald The Lucky Rabbit cartoon Sagebrush Sadie.

Due to being published in 1930, the cartoon entered the public domain on January 1, 2026.

In a scene animated by Norm Ferguson, Mickey is chased by two bloodhounds after his prison break, and we see each hound approach and sniff, then bark directly into the camera. According to Gijs Grob in Mickey's Movies: "These hounds are possibly the most elaborately designed and most naturally behaving animals in any theatrical cartoon hitherto, and would become the prototype of Pluto". In 1932, Disney's in-house art instructor Don Graham said: "The dogs were alive, real. They seemed to breathe. They moved like dogs, not drawings of dogs. The drawings explained not so much what a real dog looked like, but what a real dog did".