Studio: MGM Cartoons
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Produced by: Fred Quimby
Short Synopsis
Tom sits down at a drawing board to design the perfect mousetrap, an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption of levers, pulleys, weights and a falling anvil, worked out in precise technical detail on a sheet of blueprint paper. Exhausted, he falls asleep over it. Then the drawing comes to life. The little stick-figure mouse in Tom's plan climbs off the paper, wakes Jerry and warns him about what the cat is planning, and a stick-figure cat follows him and gives chase across the blueprint. The drawn cat and drawn mouse race through the diagram, and Jerry joins in on the side of his paper ally. Before Tom wakes up, Jerry and the stick mouse make a small, strategic alteration to the design, changing one figure in the calculations. When Tom builds the trap and sets it off, the machine works perfectly, but not the way he intended, and the result lands squarely on the cat.
Why It Matters
- The film is a lovely piece of graphic invention: the blueprint world, drawn in white lines on blue, has its own physics and its own little cartoon stars, and the idea of a drawing changing the outcome of the "real" cartoon around it is a witty comment on how animation itself works.
- It comes from the mid-1950s Tom and Jerry films, when MGM's budgets were tightening and the influence of UPA's flat, graphic style was spreading across the industry. Hanna and Barbera's use of a deliberately simple, diagrammatic look inside a classic cartoon shows the series absorbing that new design language while keeping its slapstick.
Notes and Trivia
- Footage from the film was later reused in a 1967 Tom and Jerry compilation short.
- The machine is a parody of the cartoonist Rube Goldberg's famously overcomplicated inventions.
- See also: Puss Gets the Boot (1940), The Night Before Christmas (1941).