Mouse in Manhattan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Mouse In Manhattan | |
| Tom and Jerry series | |
 Title card of Mouse in Manhattan |
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| Directed by | William Hanna Joseph Barbera |
|---|---|
| Story by | William Hanna Joseph Barbera |
| Animation by | Kenneth Muse Ed Barge Ray Patterson Irven Spence |
| Music by | Scott Bradley |
| Produced by | Fred Quimby |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Release date | July 7, 1945 |
| Format | Technicolor, 8 min |
| Language | English |
| Preceded by | The Mouse Comes to Dinner |
| Followed by | Tee for Two |
| IMDb page | |
Mouse in Manhattan is a Tom & Jerry animated short released in American theaters on 7th July 1945. In it, Jerry had enough with the country life and decides to live in the city. He writes a note from a sleeping Tom and gives him a farewell good-bye, and leaves off to New York City to see the bright lights. Here he ends up as a makeshift shoe-polisher, admires the towering skyscrapers, gets nauseous in an elevator, has a close shave with oncoming traffic, and dangles precariously over the city on an ever-breaking candle. Jerry's highlights include dancing with several placecards (in the form of attractive women), until he gets stuck in a champagne bottle and is popped all the way to the ground and chased by an alleyful of vicious cats, hurtled across the city on trash cans, smashed into a jewellery shop window and then shot at by the police. As Jerry escapes the city (and is nearly run over by a subway train), he quickly races back to the countryside, where he finds that there's no place like home. He kisses Tom enthusiastically, waking up the cat who didn't even know that he was gone.
The story is loosely modeled on The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, especially the notion of the city as a place of both riches and fear, except that no mouse takes Jerry's place in the country.
The cartoon is unusual in that Tom is barely in it and it has little or no cat-and-mouse chase scenes. Instead most of its energy comes from a fusion of music with scenery specifically city-scapes. The music was composed by Scott Bradley, and the cartoon was directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, animated by Kenneth Muse, Ed Barge, Irven Spence and Ray Patterson and produced by Fred Quimby.
