Studio: MGM Cartoons / Rudolf Ising Productions
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Produced by: Rudolf Ising, Fred Quimby
Short Synopsis
The three little kittens of the nursery rhyme have lost their mittens playing in the snow, and their mother punishes them: no milk tonight. Sent to bed, they look out at the night sky and decide to go where the milk is. They tie three helium balloons to a basket and float up past the Moon, which is made of green cheese, past Mars and the Big and Little Dippers, all the way to the Milky Way. There they find a whole land made of dairy: springs and geysers of milk, streams of cream, and everything they could want to drink. The kittens gorge themselves, until they get into trouble and start to fall back towards Earth. Then it turns out it was a dream. Their mother calls them down for supper, and the kittens race to the kitchen, only to find a bowl of milk waiting, and they are so full of imagined milk that the sight of it makes them sick.
Why It Matters
- The space flight and the dairy cosmos are a showcase for MGM's lavish early-1940s colour animation: soft, rounded kittens drifting through a sky of pastel planets, the kind of polished storybook design that MGM poured money into to compete with Disney.
- It won the Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short Subject, the first time a non-Disney cartoon won the award, and the first year that Disney was not even nominated. The other nominees included Warner's A Wild Hare, Bugs Bunny's debut, and MGM's own Puss Gets the Boot, the first Tom and Jerry, so this sentimental kitten fantasy beat two cartoons that changed the industry.
Notes and Trivia
- It went out in cinemas with the MGM feature The Captain Is a Lady.
- William Hanna co-produced it without credit.
- It has appeared as a bonus feature on DVD and Blu-ray releases of the Marx Brothers' Go West and Broadway Melody of 1940.
- See also: Puss Gets the Boot (1940), A Wild Hare (1940).