| Brave Little Tailor | |
| Director: | Bill Roberts Burt Gillett |
| Story: | Joe Grant |
| Animator: | Les Clark Ollie Johnston Fred Moore Don Patterson Milt Schaffer Frank Thomas Riley Thompson Bill Tytla Don Williams Jack Campbell (effects) Andy Engman (effects) Tony Garth (effects) John Noel Tucker (effects) |
| Music: | Albert Hay Malotte |
| Producer: | Walt Disney |
| Studio: | Walt Disney Productions |
| Distributor: | RKO Radio Pictures |
| Color Process: | Technicolor |
| Runtime: | 9 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
Brave Little Tailor is a 1938 American animated short film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures, being shown in theaters with Fugitives for a Night. It is an adaptation of the fairy tale The Valiant Little Tailor with Mickey Mouse in the title role. It was directed by Bill Roberts and Burt Gillett and features original music by Albert Hay Malotte.[1] The voice cast includes Walt Disney as Mickey, and Eddie Holden as the Giant. It was the 103rd short in the Mickey Mouse film series to be released, and the fifth for that year.[2]
The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 11th Academy Awards in 1939 but lost to Ferdinand the Bull, another short by Disney. In 1994, it was listed as the 26th greatest cartoon of all time by members of the animation field in a list compiled for the book The 50 Greatest Cartoons.[3]
During the Middle Ages in Europe, a king is seeking a brave warrior to kill a giant who has been terrorizing his small kingdom. There is much discussion in the village, but no one is willing to take on the task. While this is happening, a young peasant tailor (Mickey Mouse) kills seven flies at once while at his work. He unknowingly interrupts a conversation among several other peasants about the problems with the giant to brag loudly about his accomplishment:
Peasant (to his friends): "Say, did you ever kill a giant?"
Mickey (sticking his head out his window): "I killed seven with one blow!"
Gossip that Mickey has killed seven giants with one blow quickly spreads around the kingdom. The king summons him and asks if he really "killed seven at one blow". He goes into an elaborate retelling of how he killed the seven (flies, not giants as the king believes), which impresses the king enough to appoint him "Royal High Killer of the Giant". On discovering the misunderstanding, all of Mickey's confidence disappears, and he attempts to stammer his way out of the assignment. The king thinks he is holding out for a bigger payday and offers him increasingly vast riches and then (at her suggestion) the hand of his only daughter, Princess Minnie, in marriage if he can kill, or at least subdue, the giant. Smitten with Minnie, Mickey proclaims he'll "cut [the giant] down to my size" and sets off. When the gates of the town close behind him, however, his confidence fails him and he wants to turn back, but he sees Minnie and the townspeople cheering him on from the walls and decides to soldier on.
"Gosh", Mickey sighs to himself later, sitting in a field of a deserted countryside wondering what to do. Just then, the giant appears, forcing Mickey to scramble for a place to hide as the giant's feet crush rocks, trees and buildings, and causes nearby local animals to flee as he walks, until he stops to sit on a barn. He picks up a cart of pumpkins and eats them, as if they were grapes, with increasing handfuls until he dumps the rest into his mouth. Mickey, who was hiding in the cart with the pumpkins, keeps himself from being swallowed with them by clinging to the giant's uvula, which gives the giant a case of the hiccups. To remedy this, the giant pulls a water well from the ground and drinks from it as though it were a thermos, and Mickey is saved from drowning in the giant's stomach by getting caught by the well's bucket. The reprieve is short-lived, however, as the giant almost immediately grabs the haystack in which Mickey seeks refuge and rolls it into a cigarette, and then to light it, lifts off the roof of a nearby house to get its stove so he can use it like a lighter. He then leans on a silo to relax. The smoke makes Mickey sneeze, which finally brings him to the attention of the giant.
The giant, after getting poked in the nose with a pair of scissors, attempts to squash Mickey, but misses. Mickey lures the giant into reaching under his sleeves and quickly produces a needle and thread and binds the giant's arms. He then lassos the giant's nose, pulls it up and ties it to his hair, preventing him from opening his eyes, before swinging around him and then tripping him. The giant falls down, crushing the ground where he lands and sending a chunk of earth into the air, that falls on his head and knocks him out. After a sigh of relief, Mickey dusts his hands triumphantly.
Following the giant's defeat, an amusement park is built on the site of the battle. The carnival rides are powered, via a series of belts and gears connected to a windmill, by wind from the snoring giant, who is chained to the ground. The film ends with the king and a newly married Mickey and Minnie enjoying a ride on the carousel.
From August 28 to November 27, 1938, the Mickey Mouse comic strip published 14 Sunday newspaper comics retelling the story under the title The Brave Little Tailor. This version was bookended by segments showing the "real" Mickey Mouse as an actor who is cast by Walt Disney to appear in the film. The comic has Mac MacCorker as the fictional director of the short. Goofy also appears in these scenes and, after the wrap he is wearing the same clothes he wore in the short film The Whalers, which was released the month before Tailor.[4] The story was written by Merrill De Maris and drawn by Manuel Gonzales and Floyd Gottfredson, with inking by Ted Thwaites.[5]
In 1985, Bantam Books published a children's book called Mickey Meets the Giant which featured Mickey encountering the same giant as the one in this short. This version was somewhat more faithful to the original fairy tale, maintaining that the tailor fools the giant by apparently beating him in feats of strength.
The short was released on December 4, 2001 as part of Walt Disney Treasures: Mickey Mouse in Living Color.[6] It was also featured, along with A Knight for a Day, on DVD releases of The Sword in the Stone and was included in the 2018 Celebrating Mickey Blu-ray/DVD/Digital combo compilation and in the 2023 Mickey & Minnie: 10 Classic Shorts - Volume 1 Blu-ray/DVD/Digital combo compilation. The short is also available to stream on Disney+.