Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Short Synopsis
Plot documentation for this short is limited, and this summary combines catalogue descriptions with the surviving film. Hunky, a mother donkey, and her son Spunky, a spirited little donkey colt, live in the desert country of the Southwest. Spunky is taken away in a van from a livery stable and sold at an auction to a cruel peddler, a sharp-faced man with a moustache and a battered hat who wants him as a beast of burden. In the peddler's shed, Spunky stands his ground, ears flat and glaring, while the peddler sits on a barrel and tries to bring him into line, and Spunky refuses to be broken. Hunky sets off across the desert to find and rescue him. The title hints at how the rescue is won; the details of the climax are not described in sources this book could check.
Why It Matters
- The film shows the Fleischers' late Color Classics style: detailed, painterly desert backgrounds and a strong emotional pull built around a mother and child, much closer to Disney's sentimental shorts than to the studio's own wild early-1930s cartoons. Spunky's defiance in the face of the peddler gives the little donkey a real personality.
- Hunky and Spunky were the only recurring characters the Fleischers created for their Color Classics series, appearing in several shorts from 1938 to 1940, after their debut Hunky and Spunky was nominated for the Academy Award. This was one of the last of them, made as the studio was moving its attention to features.
Notes and Trivia
- The peddler is described in catalogue copy as an Italian stereotype, a common type in cartoons of the period.
- See also: Ants in the Plants (1940), Gulliver's Travels (1939).