A wonderfully dynamic and frenetic scene that sits at around the five-minute mark of Society Dog Show (1939), that brilliant Silly Symphony-era Mickey short directed by Bill Roberts from a Jack Kinney story, just as Pluto, having endured the indignity of being inspected, prodded and judged, decides he has had quite enough of officialdom, and the chase that follows sends the hapless Judge careening straight into Mickey.

The drawing is extraordinary for what it tells you about how Disney worked at the end of the thirties. This is not simply an animation key. It functions almost as a layout drawing: the two characters are placed in spatial relation to each other on the same sheet, the broad arcs drawn in blue pencil establishing the staging before a single cel was inked. The ink-and-paint instructions are written directly onto the sheet in blue pencil, "Pluto, Sep. Cel., Black ink, gums + teeth fine" to the upper left; "all Black ink, hair, beard, glasses and stripes on pants, fine" to the right; "Both shadows in Judge Cel." along the bottom. Scene code SC 42D M20 is circled in the upper right. The date "July 197" appears along the bottom edge. These are working directives from the production floor, written to guide the ink-and-paint department through a scene that would flash by in seconds on screen, and they survived intact.

The red pencil shading across the Judge's trousers is the kind of detail that does not appear in finished cel reproductions and is rarely discussed in accounts of Golden Age Disney production. It is the animator's shorthand, marking tone and volume for the benefit of whoever followed this drawing down the production line. The whole sheet carries that urgency, drawn at speed, and leaves no doubt about how the scene was to be composed, coloured, and staged.

The animator who drew this remains unattributed, though the credited team on Society Dog Show included Al Eugster, Norman Ferguson, Shamus Culhane, John Lounsbery and Les Clark, names that read like a roll call of the studio at its absolute peak. Any one of them might have handled a scene this physically demanding, requiring a full-body caricature of the Judge at full stretch alongside a frightened, reactive Pluto. The draftsmanship to pull both characters, at opposite ends of their movement arcs, onto a single coherent composition is not incidental, it is the work.

The artwork is offered from a private collection and the condition is, frankly, exceptional for an eighty-five-year-old working drawing. Drawings from this period that carry this level of production annotation, in this condition, with two characters on a single sheet, are an important find.