Thru the Mirror
1936 · 9m · USA
Directed by David Hand
Genres: animation, comedy, fantasy
Mickey Mouse falls asleep reading 'Through the Looking-Glass' and dreams he passes through his bedroom mirror into a topsy-turvy world where furniture and objects are alive, culminating in a Fred Astaire-style dance number with a pair of gloves and a wild chase by a deck of playing cards.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Mickey dancing with gloves in a Carroll-by-way-of-jazz-age fever dream is more surreal than people give 1930s Disney credit for. Pleasant weirdness, doesn't quite go for the throat.
Disney channels Lewis Carroll through swing-era jazz with one of the more inventive Mickey sequences of the decade. The restored Archive print confirms its choreographic ambitions.
Disney channeling Lewis Carroll into a Mickey vehicle with Astaire-style choreography against playing-card antagonists — the dance with the white gloves is a real animation flex. 601MB restored Disney Plus print on Archive should hold up.
Reviews
The animation is top-notch, with characters and backgrounds that are all well-drawn and the action is excitingly realized. Thru the Mirror is one of the masterworks of the era.
The pacing is electrifying, the comic timing excellent, and the result arguably is more in the spirit of Carroll's nonsense fairy tales than Disney's later feature-length Alice in Wonderland.