A superb original production drawing of Mickey and Pluto from Society Dog Show, one of the most warmly comic Disney shorts of 1939, catching the two in the thick of a chase that is pure slapstick gold.

The scene builds beautifully. Pluto has just endured the indignity of being prodded and examined by the dog show judge, and he has had quite enough of it. He bolts after the man, all outrage and momentum, and Mickey is doing everything in his power to hold him back. This drawing lands right at that delicious tipping point, Pluto already fully committed to the lunge, Mickey hauled along in his wake and bracing hard against the pull. The whole gag turns on the physical comedy of their sizes and temperaments: Pluto all animal fury, Mickey outmatched but stubborn. What the animator has captured here is the precise instant of maximum strain between them, and the energy comes off the sheet like a coiled spring.

This is a two-character drawing on a single 12-field sheet, which is worth noting. In standard Disney production practice, characters sharing scenes were typically drawn on separate layers to give the ink-and-paint department flexibility when compositing. When you find both leads drawn together as a single locked unit, it tells you something specific: the animator conceived this particular beat as one inseparable composition, a mechanical gag in which the relationship between the two bodies IS the joke and separating them was never an option. The production code BAL 712 N.5 is annotated in red below the figures, with the frame number 9 in the lower right corner. Bottom peg holes throughout.

The animating crew on Society Dog Show was exceptional: Al Eugster, Norman Ferguson, Shamus Culhane, John Lounsbery, and Les Clark are all credited, the short directed by Bill Roberts from a Jack Kinney story. Pluto was very much Norman Ferguson's character at this period, and the loose, rubbery, physical conviction in the dog's movement bears his influence clearly. The short itself is a minor masterpiece of the Mickey canon, a dog show setting that gives the studio every excuse to pile indignity on indignity until the inevitable explosion.

Among the most purely joyful pieces of Disney draftsmanship from the golden year of 1939.