Mouse-Warming (1952) Online

When a new family of mice move into the floorboards of a house, the resident male is overjoyed to see that the family includes the hottest little mouse he has ever seen! However attempts to put moves on her are hampered by fact that she is on the other side of the hallway - a hallway guarded by a hungry, mean cat. Will love find a way?

With a jolly animation style, bright colours, sweet mice and a romantic plot, I was terrified that this cartoon would be as bad it those few words would suggest. Things looked bleak as a cute male mouse made eyes at a cute female mouse `across the way', but happily things got better once the cat made an appearance. The material is actually pretty good when you consider the dross too often given to minor characters, I laughed quite a few times and some of the gags are actually quite imaginative and clever.

As far as characters, none of these here are really that good. The cat is easily the best as he gets the laughs by being the brunt of most of the jokes. The mice are too cutesy and nondescript to really be good as characters; in fact, if it weren't for the cat I'd have dismissed this as sickly mush.

Overall this short is actually a lot funnier and sharper than you'd think from the set up. The jokes may not be unique to this short but the basic characters do a good job of delivering the material; the cat in particular does well to lift the material out of the cutesy romantic plot into a much better vehicle.

Another of Chuck Jones' hilarious psychological shorts, about the dangers teenagers are willing to run for romance -- in this case a seventeen-month-old mouse, who is being fed forged love notes by Claude Cat. But what's that note Claude got from the bulldog?

. . . which are not as rare in the Rodent Kingdom as quads tend to be among we Human Beings. These brothers probably are identical (though mice mostly look the same to me). During the course of this seven-minute Warner Bros. animated short, Claude the yellow cat gobbles down the first three boys, one by one. (This is perhaps for the best, because the guys have only ONE toy hot rod to their name, and they're all fixated upon the same neighbor gal.) The doomed trio seem to be semi-literate, able to read but not to write. This enables Claude to trick them into his gullet, since Warner felines tend to be prolific writers, with a devious capacity for inter-species communication (that is, Claude can write Mouse). Unfortunately for the yellow cat, Mouse Brother Number Four obviously has crashed some cat training sessions, and he's able to give the half-satiated mouser a taste of his own medicine. Though this turn of events strains credulity, it's probably not the first implausible close to a Warner short. Since the romantic mouse couple are last seen in the cold storage of a refrigerator, this may be the animators' way of telegraphing that the Chill of Death (by being eaten alive) awaits the rodent pair as soon as Claude gets his appetite back.