Genre Animation

Camping Out (1934)

Item: Camping Out
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — Camping Out (1934)

By 1934, Walt Disney Productions was operating at a remarkable clip. The studio was churning out Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony shorts at a pace that would exhaust most creative operations, yet the ambition behind each release was anything but mechanical. Camping Out is a Mickey Mouse short running to just seven minutes, written by William Cottrell and directed by David Hand, a Disney stalwart who would go on to direct both Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Bambi (1942). The premise is cheerfully modest: Mickey and the gang are enjoying a peaceful camping trip until a mosquito finds them, and then several hundred more mosquitoes do too. What follows is the kind of escalating, creature-driven chaos that the Disney shorts of this period handled with real confidence. Cottrell was a regular presence in the studio's story department during the 1930s, and his instinct here is to keep things simple and let the animation do the heavy lifting.

The principal voices are the people you would expect from a Disney short of this vintage. Walt Disney himself voiced Mickey, as was standard for the era, with Pinto Colvig, the voice behind Goofy and a busy presence across the studio's output, also in the cast alongside Marcellite Garner, Melvin J. Gibby, and Alyce Ardell. The ensemble is small, as befits a seven-minute runtime, and the characters function less as individuals with arcs and more as bodies to be flung into comic situations, which is exactly right for this kind of short-form comedy. The delight is in the staging, not the psychology.

On the craft side, the cinematographer is uncredited and the editing likewise goes unnamed, but the music is the work of Bert Lewis and Frank Churchill, two composers who between them scored a considerable stretch of Disney's early output. Churchill in particular had a gift for writing themes that felt breezy and propulsive without becoming irritating on repeat viewings, and the score here keeps the energy moving without ever crowding the gags. The sound design across Disney's shorts of this period was as much a part of the comedy as the visuals, with musical stings and cartoon effects working in close rhythm with the action on screen. Visually, the short has the rounded, rubbery quality of pre-war American animation, warm and slightly squashy, with the kind of fluid character movement that the Disney animators were refining almost month by month during this stretch of the 1930s.

What strikes you first is how good it looks. The art style has a crispness and a warmth to it that holds up remarkably well. There's real care in the way the characters move, the way the gags are staged and timed. Disney's animators in this period were developing at a furious pace, and you can feel the craft in every scene here. Nothing looks lazy or rushed. The fluid, bouncy quality of the animation keeps everything light on its feet even when the comedy gets a little chaotic.

And it is genuinely funny. That might sound like a low bar, but plenty of shorts from this era mistake frantic movement for actual comedy. Camping Out earns its laughs. The premise is simple enough, built around the kinds of outdoor mishaps and creature mischief you'd expect, but the execution is sharp. The gags land because they're well constructed, not just because something loud is happening on screen. I found myself smiling throughout, which is more than I can say for plenty of longer films I've sat through recently.

What I keep coming back to, though, is that word: timeless. I don't mean it in a lazy, hand-wavy sense. I mean that nothing in Camping Out dates it in the way that some cartoons of the period date themselves, with topical references or the kind of humour that makes you wince a bit ninety years on. The core of it, characters getting into trouble outdoors, nature refusing to cooperate, chaos erupting from the simplest of situations, is as universally legible now as it would have been to a cinema audience in the thirties. That's harder to pull off than it looks.

I've been working my way through a good chunk of Mickey's output from this era, and Camping Out sits comfortably among the better entries. It doesn't quite reach the heights of something like Barnyard Olympics (1932), which has a brilliant energy and invention to it, but it's solidly in the tier below that. I'd also put it alongside Mickey's Steam Roller (1934) as one of the more satisfying shorts from that particular year. Both reward a watch even if you're not especially invested in the history of animation.

If I'm being honest, three stars is probably the right landing spot. It's not a short that's going to stay with you for weeks or change the way you think about the medium. It doesn't have that ambition, and it doesn't pretend to. What it does is deliver a tight, well-animated, funny little film that respects your time and sends you off in a good mood. In 1934 or 2024, that's worth something.

Worth a look, especially if you're dipping into the Disney shorts catalogue. Don't overthink it. Just enjoy it.

I also covered Barnyard Olympics (1932) and Mickey's Steam Roller (1934) if you want to put Camping Out in a bit more context alongside its contemporaries. Both are worth your time, and together the three give you a reasonable sense of where Mickey's shorts sat at their most dependable. Seven minutes well spent, then. Sometimes that really is enough.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1934 | Watched: 2025-08-28

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

Camping Out (1934)

Read more

American Beauty (1999)

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

The Babadook (2014)

The Peanuts Movie (2015)

The films worth your time, once a week.