That Mouse
1967 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Michael Rubbo
Genres: animation, comedy, family
A white mouse riding on a bumbling black bear stirs up the forest until a deer, tortoise, hawk, and hound join forces to stop the disruption, in a children's film where animals speak and act like humans.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A talking-animal fable from 1967 that actually earns its chaos — the mouse-and-bear dynamic is genuinely anarchic, and watching the forest's establishment animals mobilize against disruption feels like a sly political allegory hiding in plain sight, which is either genius or a happy accident, but I'm betting genius.
Rubbo's formal control over the ensemble — the precise staging of five animals converging on a problem, the rhythmic editing that builds from whimsy to genuine stakes — places this squarely in the theatrical animation tradition while refusing to condescend to its audience; the craft here is understated but immaculate.
The casting choice to make the mouse and bear *actually* incompetent together — not malicious, just thoughtlessly disruptive — is the decision that transforms this from a standard morality play into something that actually captures how chaos works, and the sound design of their fumbling carries the whole film's comedic weight.