Primitive Pluto
Hearing the wolves howl while he stays in Mickey’s Wildlife Retreat makes Pluto’s ancestral lupine instinct awake, personified and determined to make the desperately domesticated city canine catch up with his wild hunting roots. Alas the dog bumbles at every skill a hunter needs, from tracking to handling a bunny. Yet the wolf instinct sends Pluto on the tracks of a bear, so frightening that even the instigator…
Pluto's wild wolf ancestry appears as a small hectoring version of himself, insisting he return to nature. Personifying an instinct as a separate character is a device the studio used repeatedly, and it works particularly well here because the argument is genuinely funny — domestication versus the wild, conducted entirely by a dog with himself.