Mirror Monkeys

There’s no plot in Monkey Madness (1930), just monkeys and other characters moving and making noise in time to the beat of the soundtrack.

There is a lot of reused animation in this Disney short. And a lot of mirror-image animation where the character on one side of the screen is the same as one on the other side, just in reverse. In the case of the monkey, the design is modified slightly because one character is female.



Even the reflections are mirror images. There's an awful lot of kissing in this cartoon.



I generally don’t mind plotless musical-type shorts of the first couple of years of the 1930s but this one is devoid of any real humour. The Fleischer studio, with their little surprise gags popping up, were way ahead of this.

Disney paid to use a song in this short. It opens with “Abba Dabba Honeymoon,” though its lyrics about a monkey and a chimp are not heard.