Pluto

Pluto’s Judgment Day makes Pluto the accused in a nightmare trial whose staged condemnation draws on political show-trials and popular musical comedy. When the sentence of public burning begins to become real, Pluto wakes to an actual fire approaching his tail, collapsing the distance between the dream’s spectacle and the danger around him.

Identity and Introduction

Pluto is the central figure of Disney’s 1935 cartoon Pluto’s Judgment Day. After falling asleep near a fire, he dreams that cats have dragged him before their court. The cartoon places him in the position of a defendant before a hostile assembly: he is designated a Public Enemy, confronted with accusations of anti-feline behavior, and condemned to public burning.

The Dream Trial

The trial unfolds as a mocking show-trial. A series of witnesses accuse Pluto, turning the proceedings into a public performance in which judgment is delivered through collective accusation and spectacle. The sentence is not merely announced: the cats condemn him to be burned, and the dream carries the punishment to the point where Pluto starts to burn.

The nightmare’s threat has a concrete waking counterpart. Pluto had fallen asleep near a fire, and as the dream’s burning begins, the real fire has been getting nearer and nearer to his tail. He wakes as the two scenes meet. The transition makes the dream’s danger literal without making the trial itself real: the cats’ court belongs to the nightmare, while the approaching fire does not.

Political Satire and Musical Form

The cartoon’s trial carries political references beyond its imaginary court. The book connects its Public Enemy designation both to the Moscow Trials, for which 1935 was the first big year, and to the orchestrated campaign against gangster Public Enemies in the United States, described as part of the public relations work of Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Pluto’s accusations and sentence thus echo the broader political use of public enemies and staged judgment.

The show-trial is also presented as a musical number, with ironic references to popular songs, culminating in “Three Little Maids from School” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The juxtaposition makes the proceedings at once theatrical and menacing: the musical form does not interrupt the trial but supplies its rhythm and public display. The book identifies the cartoon as establishing, ten years before Eisenstein, a link between the musical and the political show-trial.