If you’re only attending  fly fishing film festival screenings, you’re missing out on some top-notch angling media.

If you’re only watching Star Wars and Marvel on your Disney+ subscription, you’re also missing out on some top-notch angling media.

Because one of the finest short films to document the fisherman is the 1942 picture entitled, How to Fish. It features Goofy. Yes, that Goofy: the anthropomorphic dog.

Along with How to Fish, there are a number of other excellent entries in the series: How to Play Baseball, How to Play Football, and How to Swim being standouts. But How to Fish is truly worth every fly fisher with the streaming service’s time. In a short 7 minutes, it successfully communicates some timeless truths about the pursuit.

Goofy obsesses about fishing.

He plays with his gear in his living room.

He gets his backcast stuck in a tree.

He hooks into something that isn’t a fish and gets his hopes up.

He gets laughed at by fish.

Again, in a short 7 minutes Disney captures the spirit and the experience of fishing quite well. And I mean that in all seriousness. Because it is just fishing. It is something CEOs and kids and winos and cartoon dogs can do. There is a shared experience that we can corporately laugh about together, regardless of who we are and where we fish. Snags are just as frustrating and funny at the end of a thousand-dollar fly rod as a cane pole. And falling in, Goofy reminds us, is going to happen and should elicit a laugh.

So I encourage you to watch How to Fish over on Disney+ (or, if you’re so inclined, on the countless free platforms that feature said cartoon online). It is eighty years old, it is short, and it is goofy. But it portrays some abiding realities about us and the culture of fly fishing.