“Gee willikers! This is the life!”
Supervision by Charles M. Jones; Story by Dave Monahan; Animation by Phil Monroe; Musical Direction by Carl W. Stalling. A Merrie Melody released in 1940.
As the title suggests, this short is about Sniffles taking a vacation. He is off for a relaxing time in the country. He’s got his bindle and follows the train tracks out of the city. He knows he’s made it by the sound of the singing robins. (A crow.) He happily enters Country Meadows. A lovely place that boasts having fresh air, babbling brooks, and pretty flowers. Sniffles takes in the splendors of nature (the flora, the fauna, the fungi) and pulls out a pair of binoculars to look around. Getting a rather close up look of a fly in the process. Well, time for the real reason anyone goes on a vacation: to sleep. He sets up a hammock and nods off. It’s not long before he is woken up by a woodpecker. Rather than fight, the mouse simply moves his hammock to another location. He ends up tying it to the legs of a… stork? Swan? Whooping Crane? It looks like some sort of wader, but the beak is rounded and the crest doesn’t look like it belongs there. But I digress. The bird walks into some water, taking Sniffles along with it. He realizes rather quickly that he is underwater. He climbs out and onto the bill of the curlew/egret/albino flamingo with a Mohawk. Scared, he falls into the water and swims away from what he believes to be an alligator. (Considering he just leaped off of a spoonbill/ibis, I wouldn’t doubt that he’s in the everglades.) It’s just a cute widdle froggie though. (No really. It’s adorable and I want it.) Sniffles heads back to camp. That night, he huddles near his campfire and reflects on how dark it has gotten. The nearby quail, grasshoppers, and moths look much more threatening in the P.M. But the scariest thing in the woods is the various eyes that watch you. (I have no doubt that this is scarier than Disney’s “Snow White.” That shows the forest creepies to be her imagination making trees look more evil than usual, and the eyes are just simply the animals that live there.) We never get to find out exactly what is watching him. Having had enough of the “peaceful” life, Sniffles flees back home.
Personal Rating: 3