Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
Late at night in a bookshop, Sniffles the mouse is reading a book called Egg Collecting for Amateurs. It recommends the egg of the great barn owl as a good first specimen. His friend, a bespectacled bookworm, knows where to find one and leads him up to the top of an old church tower. Creeping through the shadowy belfry, they find the owl's nest and an egg, and Sniffles lifts it out of its cradle. But the father owl looms out of the dark before they can get away. The owl calmly asks Sniffles if he knows what he is: a rodent. And does he know what owls eat? Rodents. And worms. The bookworm faints on the spot, and Sniffles runs for his life, carrying his friend with him, as fast as his legs can go.
Why It Matters
- The film is a lesson in atmosphere. Jones builds the climb up the dark church tower slowly, with looming shadows and long silences, so that the owl's deadpan menu of who eats whom lands as both a joke and a real fright. It is gentle, cute and creepy at once.
- It comes from the period when Chuck Jones, newly a director, was making cute, Disney-influenced films with Sniffles the mouse before finding his own sharper comic voice. Watching Sniffles films like this one shows where the director of What's Opera, Doc? started, with careful staging and timing already visible.
Notes and Trivia
- It is the fourth cartoon featuring Sniffles.
- The owl had previously appeared in Jones's Little Brother Rat (1939).
- The 1949 Blue Ribbon reissue replaced the original titles, which are now lost; restored versions use the reissue titles.
- See also: A Wild Hare (1940).