The animation in this early colour Disney short still looks good 72 years on, and the cartoon will probably appeal equally to environmentalists and acid-heads.

Seemed like everyone had a garden back then. Donald would have one about seven years later, but it wasn't as funny. This 1935 short stars Mickey and Pluto and is unvoiced until the final few seconds. Mickey has a vegetable garden which is being overrun by the cast of 'Hoppity goes to town'. Angrily he employs a large vat to concoct the ultimate bug poison, using various noxious ingredients (one of which is 'Sheep Dip', which must have made lots of sense to an American audience).

Unfortunately the bugs love it. Not only that, but due to a backfire, Mickey gets a faceful of the spray himself, which causes him to go into a long, hallucinatory shrinking sequence which recalls 'Alice in Wonderland' and presages 'Dumbo'. The animation at the start of this sequence is really quite superb.

The short also employs lots of visual puns - the most surreal of which being the potato which is devoured, leaving just the bewildered 'eyes'.

Eventually the effects wear off, and Mickey finds himself strangling a garden hose. Meanwhile though, Pluto has somehow managed to get stuck inside a large pumpkin, resulting in various scenes where the pumpkin appears to bark. I couldn't swear to it, but it seems likely that this is where Frank Zappa got the name for his label 'Barking Pumpkin Records'.

This isn't the greatest thing ever made, but it proved that in 1935 Disney still ruled the roost.

A little personal trivia: this is one of the first cartoons I've ever seem (at least, is one of the earliest in my memories).

Mickey's Garden is one of the best-looking shorts from this era; the animation is very fluid, the designs of the big-bad-bugs are brilliant and it have a simply amazing color setting - although I never seem this one in any digital format, the colors looked vivid and bright to me.

Although the hallucinogenic herbicide thingy seems a little bit too bizarre to me nowadays, it works fine as a ground to a series of conflicts between Mickey and Pluto and giant insects. Don't expect do laugh here, it's just a plain fun thing to watch.