The 10 Best Mickey Mouse Shorts In History, Ranked
Mickey Mouse isn’t just an icon of entertainment, he’s a pillar of popular culture. He’s the masthead of the Walt Disney company and all its offshoots, from movie studios and theme parks to merchandising and apparel. There’s a good reason why he became the first cartoon character to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Mickey Mouse’s animated shorts started it all. Cartoons were Disney’s stock-in-trade for a long time from the late 1920s, and they're where Mickey Mouse became the star he is today. In 2013, this started again, as Mickey Mouse’s YouTube channel starting publishing new Mickey shorts that use a new style of animation but harken back to his original animated antics. With that in mind, here are our picks for the ten best Mickey Mouse shorts ever.
10 Fire Escape - 2014
From the second season of his new run of animated shorts, Fire Escape is a great episode filled with call-backs to the classic Mickey Mouse shorts. One thing that’s evident in lots of the new shorts is a high-speed style of animation and Fire Escape is an excellent example of this. The whole episode is a breakneck string of visual gags that all surround Mickey’s unrelenting protection of Minnie as he tries to rescue her from a ‘burning building’.
What’s so great about this episode is the way is connects us to the classic animations of Mickey’s inception. It has the slapstick gags that Walt Disney loved filling Mickey shorts, as well as the flexibility that allows Mickey to bend and reshape himself for the sake of those gags; something that Ub Iwerks animated so well.
9 Carnaval - 2018
Mickey wasn’t just an icon of Americana in the 1930s, he was a worldwide phenomenon. South America played a big part in the Disney Company’s development over the years, with Walt Disney famously being asked to take a trip to the continent, where he developed several shorts for the films Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.
Carnaval is an incredibly fun short in the new run of animated classics, celebrating Disney’s connection with Latin America with a jaunt through Rio’s Carnaval where Mickey flexes his language skills and only speaks Portuguese. It also has a great nod to the early Disney animated classics featuring a cameo from José Carioca, a bit-part Disney animated character and friend of Donald Duck.
8 Canine Caddy - 1941
By 1941, more than a decade into their relationship, Mickey and his faithful dog Pluto were inseparable. One of the best episodes to feature just these two characters is Canine Caddy, a short filled with great slapstick moments that shows the brilliant bond between them.
Mickey’s Have a Laugh version on YouTube sees the seven-minute long short cut down to something just under three minutes, to appeal to the channel’s audience, but finding the original version is well worth your time. It features lots of Mickey being incredibly bad at playing golf, spinning himself into a corkscrew trying to hit the ball while Pluto must duck and dodge to avoid being hit by Mickey’s errant golf balls.
7 Mickey’s Rival - 1936
Mortimer Mouse was supposedly Mickey’s original name, depending on who you believe. Whether it was or not, a character bearing that names appears in Mickey’s Rival, an excellent Mickey short from 1936.
When Mortimer, a much taller, much more suave mouse turns up to crash Mickey and Minnie’s picnic, Mickey is humiliated, as Minnie seems besotted by the visitor. The resulting hijinks see Mortimer trying to show off by playing matador with a bull in the field next to them - something that doesn’t go well. This excellent short has everything you’d expect from Disney’s leading mouse; his love for Minnie, his flaring temper, his misplaced courageousness and even his anthropomorphic car.
6 Entombed - 2016
One of the things that the new animated shorts allow for is more absurdity. Because modern cartoons are faster and cheaper to make, there isn’t as much on the line as the early Mickey Mouse shorts, so they can take risks that the original hand drawn cartoons couldn’t. Entombed is a great example of this, as it’s certainly one of the more absurd shorts in the new run.
Mickey takes Minnie to Egypt in search of lost treasure where they get separated by booby traps in the ‘Lost Tomb’. What follows is an offbeat adventure through an ancient tomb, that sees Mickey knocked about as he tried to reunite with Minnie. One of the most elaborate and certainly most enjoyable of the new animated series, Entombed is high up there with lots of Mickey’s classic shorts.
5 The Gallopin’ Gaucho - 1928
The second short to feature Mickey Mouse, The Gallopin’ Gaucho was actually released after Steamboat Willie as the company couldn’t initially find a distributor. Then, after the success of Mickey’s public debut aboard the S.S Willie, sound was added to The Gallopin’ Gaucho for its release.
You can see in this short how Mickey’s look changed in the space of the two shorts; he was much less ‘cutesy’ and had an almost comic-strip like look. Walt Disney voices Mickey - and Minnie - in this short. It has an almost raw nature to it and set up a lot of the physicality of Mickey, showing exactly how he can shape and reshape himself to help him along, something that he’s used right the way through his on-screen career.
4 No - 2016
One thing Walt Disney always wanted to instill in Mickey is a sense of selflessness and it’s one of the things that made him a beloved character all over the world. No is a short that plays on this, where Mickey’s inability to deny his friends of anything sees him having everything taken away from him. It has a great line-up of classic Disney characters including Donald Duck and Goofy, but also sees cameos from Scrooge McDuck, Huey, Dewey and Louie and even the Three Little Pigs from the 1939 Silly Symphony of the same name.
The quick humour of the short reflects Walt Disney’s ideal Mickey Mouse and is one of the new shorts that ties up the story nicely in a little moral, telling the audience that what comes around goes around.
3 Touchdown Mickey - 1932
One of the freedoms of creating Mickey Mouse cartoons was the ability to give him a different job in every short. A very early one from 1932, Touchdown Mickey is just one of these, as he takes on the role of football player in a short that acts as a great love letter to one of America’s favourite sports.
The short is so good because it’s a fast-paced affair teeming with slapstick action and visual gags. Because it was so early on in his career, it’s also one of the more Mickey-worshipping cartoons, as he plays the star player on a football team. He uses his trademark courteousness and ability to use other people’s strengths against them to lead his team to victory in the last minutes of a game.
2 Mickey’s Service Station - 1935
Mickey wouldn’t be anything without his line up of comrades, and that’s never more apparent than in shorts like Mickey’s Service Station from 1935. It sees the big three - Mickey, Donald Duck and Goofy - running a garage and trying to fix a car in ten minutes before a very disgruntled Pete comes back.
Mickey wrestles with a tyre while Goofy accidentally stuffs Donald into the car, in a long string of visuals gags that you come to expect in any Mickey Mouse short featuring these three characters. The slapstick nature of the characters’ Three Stooges-like hijinks is what audiences love about early Disney cartoons, and that’s what makes Mickey’s Service Station such a highly-ranked Mickey Mouse short.
1 Steamboat Willie - 1928
Steamboat Willie was the short that introduced the world to its favourite animated mouse in 1928. Released in black and white with ground-breaking sync sound, Steamboat Willie was in fact the third Mickey short created but the first to receive a wide public release. It might be an obvious choice for the top spot but it’s for good reason - Steamboat Willie is as impressive today as it was 90 years ago.
While Mickey’s antics in the short might seem dated by today’s standards of gender equality and the treatment of animals, Steamboat Willie still encapsulates everything that audiences love about Mickey. His unfettering protection of Minnie Mouse, his valiant way of always standing up to bullies (in this case, Pete) and his musical ability. While it wasn’t strictly the first to use synchronised sound, it was the first that gained a big public reception. You can tell Walt knew this one would be a hit, because the musical scene where Mickey plays a song using a host of farmyard animals is silly and indulgent and is what really makes the short what it is.