A Cartoonist’s Nightmare 1935

At closing time, the studio is almost silent, with only one animator Jack Carr lingering to finish a sequence while an elderly custodian keeps watch nearby. In the animator’s own drawing, Beans Tommy Bond the cat meets a goblin inside a dungeon, and a steel barricade he draws between them stands as a fragile barrier to keep the two apart. Exhausted after hours of non‑stop work, the artist drifts off for a moment, and the goblin, somehow waking the page, slips past the barrier and drags the animator into the living illustration beyond the scene.

The moment of alarm becomes a reality as the animator finds himself in a mystic chamber where painted portraits of various villains line the walls—figures that are the animator’s own creations as well as those of his colleagues. These sinister figures come to life with a clear, shared purpose: revenge for always being subdued at the end of each film. They hand the desperate artist a pencil and force him to draw a deep pit in the floor, then toss him inside. At the bottom, a crocodile waits, and the animator clings to a stubborn branch in a bid to stay out of its hungry reach.

Back at Beans’s scene, the barricade still holds, but the cat’s courage grows. Little Kitty appears with a lunchbox, and Beans digs through to discover a hidden saw. With that tool in paw, he cuts through the metal fence and moves out into the wider world of the drawing, determined to locate his animator.

Beans finally reaches the chamber where the animator is being tormented by the laughing villains. To disrupt their plan, Beans hurls boots at the goblin, drawing their attention away as he fights for his ally. The animator, inspired by Beans’s daring, accepts the same pencil and sketches a ladder to climb out of the pit. When the villains return, the animator pulls the ladder from the hole, while Beans squirts grease between the room’s entrance and the pit, sending the villains sliding into the pit’s edge. The goblin tries to escape, but the angry animator delivers a final punch and sends it tumbling into the pit as well. To seal their fate, the animator erases the hole with an eraser, vanquishing the threats for good. Beans and the animator share a relieved, grateful handshake for a job well done.

Only a dream, it turns out—the custodian wakes the exhausted artist, and the desk drawing remains unchanged. Refusing to dwell on the nightmare, the animator calmly erases both the goblin and the barricade and ends with a bright, cheerful image: a platter of gelatin for Beans to enjoy, a small, satisfying reward that brings a broad smile to Beans’s face.

This surreal night, anchored by the voices of the studio’s creations—the Demon Beast and other Villains—remains a vivid reminder of the thin line between imagination and danger, yet also of the partnership between creator and character that makes every cartoon worth the fight.