Directed by: Walt Disney

Starring: Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Tom Cat (Kat Nipp), a band of mice

Voice Performances: Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse), Marcellite Garner (Minnie Mouse)

STORY

When the cat’s away, the mice will play.

And when Mickey Mouse is one of those mice, they will do considerably more than play.

Tom Cat is preparing to leave his house for a hunting trip. Once the enormous feline heads off with his gun, Mickey realizes that the neighborhood mice have just been presented with an irresistible opportunity.

The cat is gone.

The house is empty.

And Mickey, Minnie and an entire gang of mice are moving in.

Soon Tom Cat’s quiet home becomes the site of an enormous mouse party.

But this isn't simply a raid on the pantry.

It's a concert.

The mice discover Tom's musical instruments and household objects and transform the house into their own miniature orchestra. Mickey and Minnie dance across the keys of a piano. A wheel of Swiss cheese becomes part of an ingenious player-piano gag. A phonograph becomes another opportunity for Mickey's imagination — and his remarkably useful cartoon tail.

Everyday objects suddenly become musical instruments, dance floors and playground equipment.

The result is less a conventional story than an explosion of music, movement and visual invention.

And that is precisely what makes When the Cat’s Away such a fascinating piece of early Mickey Mouse history.

This is 1929.

Mickey Mouse is still brand new.

Walt Disney and his animators are experimenting with synchronized music, movement, character scale and the possibilities of a cartoon universe where virtually anything can become part of the performance.

Mickey and Minnie aren't simply living inside that universe.

For once, they really are mice living in a world built for creatures much larger than themselves.

The piano keys tower beneath their feet.

Household objects become enormous.

And Tom Cat isn't merely another cartoon animal approximately Mickey's size.

He's a CAT.

Mickey is a MOUSE.

That simple decision completely changes the visual world around them.

When the Cat’s Away captures Mickey and Minnie during one of the most experimental periods of their development — when nobody yet knew exactly what rules Mickey Mouse cartoons were supposed to follow.

So Walt Disney and his artists simply kept inventing them.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
MICKEY IS ACTUALLY MOUSE-SIZED!

This is one of the strangest and most delightful curiosities in Mickey Mouse history.

In most Mickey cartoons, Mickey and Minnie exist at roughly the same scale as the other anthropomorphic animals around them.

Not here.

In When the Cat’s Away, Mickey, Minnie and their friends are portrayed as actual mice in comparison with Tom Cat.

The cat is enormous.

The mice are tiny.

Furniture and household objects tower over them.

It is a fascinating glimpse of an idea that Disney ultimately did not adopt as the standard Mickey universe.

MICKEY AND MINNIE — TOGETHER AGAIN

Minnie Mouse was there virtually from Mickey's beginning.

She appeared in Plane Crazy, The Gallopin’ Gaucho and Steamboat Willie — the first three Mickey Mouse cartoons produced — and she continued appearing alongside Mickey as the series developed.

By When the Cat’s Away, Mickey and Minnie were already becoming an established screen pair.

They weren't characters who were developed separately and paired later.

Their screen histories were intertwined from the beginning.

THE SIXTH MICKEY CARTOON PRODUCED

When the Cat’s Away was the sixth Mickey Mouse cartoon produced.

Think about that.

There was no decades-long Mickey tradition yet.

There wasn't an enormous library of Mickey Mouse films.

The filmmakers themselves were still discovering what a Mickey Mouse cartoon could be.

That makes these earliest shorts particularly fascinating because we aren't merely watching the character.

We're watching the character being developed.

AN OLD IDEA GETS A NEW MOUSE

The basic premise wasn't entirely new to Walt Disney.

When the Cat’s Away revisited an idea Disney had used several years earlier in the 1925 Alice Comedy Alice Rattled by Rats.

That earlier cartoon also involved mice taking advantage of a cat's absence and invading the house.

Now Walt had a new star.

Instead of simply abandoning a useful comic premise, Disney could reinvent it around Mickey Mouse and the rapidly developing possibilities of synchronized sound.

MUSIC IS THE STORY

There isn't much conventional plot here.

There doesn't need to be.

Once Tom Cat leaves, the cartoon becomes an extended musical playground.

That was enormously important during this period of animation.

Sound wasn't merely something added underneath the pictures.

The drawings could move WITH the music.

Actions could create beats.

Objects could become instruments.

Characters could dance directly to the rhythm.

The synchronization itself became part of the entertainment.

CARL STALLING AND THE SOUND OF CARTOONS

The music was composed and arranged by Carl Stalling, one of the foundational figures in animation music.

Stalling's association with Walt Disney came during this enormously important transitional period when filmmakers were learning how synchronized music could transform animated cartoons.

He would later become legendary for his work scoring Warner Bros. cartoons, where his extraordinarily inventive musical approach became inseparable from the sound of classic animation.

Here we catch him near the beginning of that extraordinary journey.

UB IWERKS WAS STILL THERE

Ub Iwerks was one of the principal animators on When the Cat’s Away, along with Ben Sharpsteen.

Iwerks had been essential to Mickey Mouse from the character's creation.

His extraordinary drawing ability and speed helped make Walt Disney's ambitious early Mickey production schedule possible.

These early Mickey cartoons weren't being produced by the enormous animation organization Disney would eventually become.

They came from a young studio fighting to establish its newest star.

BEN SHARPSTEEN JOINS THE STORY

Another important Disney name appears in the animation credits: Ben Sharpsteen.

Sharpsteen joined the Disney studio in 1929 and would go on to have a major career there, eventually working as a director and production supervisor on important Disney animated features.

When the Cat’s Away therefore gives us another glimpse of talent arriving during the formative years of the Disney studio.

TOM CAT — OR KAT NIPP?

The enormous feline is identified in the cartoon as Tom Cat, but the character is also associated with the early Disney character Kat Nipp.

Kat Nipp belongs to that wonderfully fluid period of Disney character development when names, appearances and identities were not always as rigidly standardized as they would later become.

He would never achieve anything approaching the fame of Mickey, Minnie or Pete.

But for a moment, this giant cat had a house full of mice — and Mickey Mouse was leading them.

THE SWISS CHEESE PLAYER PIANO

One of the cartoon's most ingenious visual gags turns a wheel of Swiss cheese into a player-piano roll.

Those famous holes suddenly have a completely different purpose.

It is exactly the kind of visual joke animation makes possible: take something audiences instantly recognize, change its scale and purpose, and suddenly an ordinary piece of cheese becomes part of a musical machine.

MICKEY'S TAIL WAS USEFUL!

Early animators had a wonderful advantage that later Mickey cartoons wouldn't exploit nearly as often.

Mickey had a long, wonderfully flexible tail.

And cartoon anatomy didn't have to follow any rules.

In When the Cat’s Away, Mickey's tail becomes part of the machinery of the musical fun, including the phonograph sequence.

If Mickey needed another tool, the animators already had one attached to him.

AINTOID: BEFORE MICKEY SPOKE

We are still in the period before Mickey Mouse became a fully speaking cartoon personality.

These early synchronized-sound shorts relied heavily on music, noises, physical action and occasional vocal sounds rather than conventional dialogue.

Mickey's personality therefore had to come through his movement.

The drawings did the acting.

AINTOID: THE HOUSE BECOMES AN ORCHESTRA

One of the great pleasures of When the Cat’s Away is watching the animators transform an ordinary house into a musical playground.

A piano isn't simply a piano.

A phonograph isn't simply a phonograph.

Cheese isn't simply food.

Once Mickey and his friends arrive, everything has another possible purpose.

That freedom became one of the great traditions of animated comedy.

AINTOID: A SIX-MINUTE TIME CAPSULE

When the Cat’s Away runs only about seven minutes.

Yet inside those few minutes we find Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, Ben Sharpsteen, Carl Stalling and the rapidly developing art of synchronized-sound animation.

And perhaps most wonderfully, we find something that wouldn't last:

Mickey Mouse actually being treated like a mouse.

Nearly a century later, that makes this tiny cartoon a wonderful little time capsule from the period when Mickey's world still had no established rules.

They were making them up as they went along.