The Spirit of Springtime brings spring with him as he frolics about, waking Pluto to the joys of the season of life. Pluto wanders through the forest admiring songbirds and mimicking jumping lambs before landing into some brush and scaring a family of quails. As one of the quail chicks flees from him, Pluto mimics it as well by running after it in a caricaturizing fashion. The quail stops as it hears deep singing coming from an underground burrow, which reveals itself to be a caterpillar singing in a high-pitched falsetto. The quail attempts to eat the caterpillar, but the aid that Pluto offers the quail ultimately does more harm than good as it ends up causing the quail to get stuck in the burrow. The caterpillar kicks the quail out of the burrow and offscreen then digs another tunnel out behind Pluto where she proceeds to climb up Pluto's tail and the deep voice starts singing again. When the caterpillar reaches the tip of Pluto's tail, she lassos a silk strand to the end of the tail, jumps off, and rapidly spins herself into a cocoon. Pluto shakes the cocoon out of curiosity before it starts moving as the caterpillar emerges, but now as a humanoid, female butterfly. Pluto is enthralled by her beauty as she proceeds to entertain him with some sexy dancing, which inspires him to mimic her. In her dancing, she had used a water droplet as a ball, so Pluto finds instead a beehive. The bees get angry and attack Pluto, forcing him into a patch of poison ivy. As he scratches himself, he lands in a patch of goldenrods and starts sneezing. Then it starts to rain, and then to hail, followed by a lightning storm, causing the terrified Pluto to run back to his now dilapidated doghouse. When the Spirit of Spring comes by again, Pluto, in a vengeful rage, chases him down, thus ending the short.
Has nothing to do with Springtime for Hitler.
This cartoon provides examples of:
- Ambiguous Gender: The caterpillar who first seems to sing with a deep voice, which is later revealed to be a gag because it was underground and its voice was echoing through the tunnel, because once it emerges, its voice is very high-pitched and falsetto. However, during its Transformation Sequence, it again sings in a deep bass, though its mouth is never shown to move in sync with the words so its questionable whether the caterpillar is even singing the song at this point. However since when it finishes its metamorphosis and emerges as a very sexy latina butterfly, this could be a case of female all along or a Gender Bender, in which case it is most certainly an Attractive Bent-Gender.
- Artistic License – Biology:
- The caterpillar comes up out of a burrow like an earthworm. Let that sink in a bit.
- Butterfly caterpillars don't make cocoons out of their silk like moth caterpillars. Butterfly ones shed their skin, and become chrysalises.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: At the end of the short, the narrator either sneezes because of hay fever (just like Pluto) or because he has caught a cold from the bad weather. Or, it could from his nose being clogged, as his voice throughout the episode sounds nasal.
- Butterfly of Transformation: Quite literally, and to an extent, its use symbolizes the return of life after winter.
- The Cameo: The Spirit of Spring looks an awful lot like the satyrs from Fantasia
- Fairy Sexy: While technically a butterfly, her human body paired with her butterfly wings and antennas gives her a fairy-like appearance. And she is quiet attractive.
- Gender Bender: Implied with the caterpillar, who has masculine appearance pre-transformation, but looks very feminine post-transformation.
- Hartman Hips: The butterfly girl has some hips that sure don't lie.
- Humanoid Female Animal: The butterfly looks less like an insect and more like a human woman with wings and antennae.
- Ms. Fanservice: The butterfly girl is very attractive, with a short pink dress and a luscious humanoid figure.
- Pantsless Males, Fully-Dressed Females: A unique case in which this trope applies to a single character. The caterpillar that appears halfway through the short wears only shoes and gloves, but transforms into a fully clothed butterfly woman, with a pink dress and shoes.
- Pretty in Mink: The butterfly girl wears a pink dress trimmed with black fur.
- Scary Stinging Swarm: Pluto inadvertently upsets the bees inside the Stock Beehive he was playing with.
- Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: Two examples of this trope embodied in a single character; the caterpillar who is green, segmented, has four arms, at least four legs and a pair of antennae, also has a dog-like humanoid face with big eyes and big lips, wears White Gloves on its Four-Fingered Hands and stereotypical round Disney shoes, turns into a butterfly who is a perfectly humanoid (and jarringly beautiful) Latina-looking woman with five-fingered hands wearing a magenta dress and heels. The only features that show that she is a butterfly are her size, her wings, and her antennae. May also be an example of Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism.
- Spicy Latina: Well, playful, flirty and extremely confident applies well to the Butterfly.
- Stock Beehive: Pluto the Pup plays with one as if it were a ball. Not soon after that he has to deal with the bees living inside.
- Through a Face Full of Fur: An abashed Pluto's face is flushed red, after the Latina butterfly (who had just metamorphosed from a male caterpillar after spinning a cocoon at the tip of the dog's tail and emerging from it as the new form) catches him checking her out as she dances provocatively.
- Wakeup Makeup: When the butterfly emerges from her cocoon, not only does she have dark purple eyeliner and lipstick, but she is also fully clothed with a frilly magenta dress and matching strap-heels (before the transformation, the caterpillar was naked except for gloves and shoes).
- White Gloves: The caterpillar wears these before its metamorphosis.
