General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Gnome-Mobile

The Gnome-Mobile is a 1967 American live-action fantasy comedy from Walt Disney Productions, directed by Robert Stevenson, in which a California lumber tycoon and his two grandchildren help the last two gnomes of the redwood forests find the rest of their kind. It stars Walter Brennan in a dual role, with Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice, and is based on Upton Sinclair's novel The Gnomobile: A Gnice Gnew Gnarrative With Gnonsense, but Gnothing Gnaughty.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York opening 19 July 1967; Los Angeles opening 9 August 1967; D23 and IMDb give a 12 July 1967 release¹^•²^•³
Director / writer	Robert Stevenson; screenplay by Ellis Kadison, from Sinclair's novel¹
Lead cast	Walter Brennan as D. J. Mulrooney and Knobby; Matthew Garber as Rodney; Karen Dotrice as Elizabeth; Tom Lowell as Jasper; Ed Wynn as Rufus¹
Running time	90 minutes per AFI; U.S. Copyright records indicate 85 minutes¹
Music	Title song by Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman; score by Buddy Baker¹
Rating	G (MPAA)⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Driving his vintage 1930 Rolls-Royce, lumber tycoon D. J. Mulrooney takes his visiting grandchildren, Rodney and Elizabeth Winthrop, on a picnic in a redwood forest. Elizabeth wanders off and meets Jasper, a two-foot-high gnome, and his 943-year-old grandfather Knobby. Jasper cannot find a girl gnome to marry, so his species is in danger of extinction, and Elizabeth persuades Mulrooney to put his Rolls at the gnomes' disposal for a quest to find others.¹

Jasper and Knobby are kidnapped by Horatio Quaxton, proprietor of the "Academy of Fantastic Freaks." When Mulrooney orders his vice-president Ralph Yarby to organize a search party, the millionaire is committed to a sanitarium. Knobby escapes into the woods, the children free their grandfather and rescue Jasper, and after a chase over the mountains the Rolls reaches a glade where Knobby has contacted the 1,100-year-old gnome-king Rufus and a group of gnome-maidens. A contest is held to see which maiden can catch Jasper and hold on for a count of seven; the shy Violet wins, Rufus marries the couple, and Mulrooney donates 50,000 acres of his land to the gnomes.¹ D23 summarizes the ending as the lumberman deeding the forest to the gnomes for eternity.²

Production

On 3 March 1965, Variety announced that Walt Disney Productions had optioned the film rights to Sinclair's novel; the 22 September 1965 issue reported that the purchase brought the studio's current projects to nine, described as an all-time high for Disney at the time. Principal photography began on 11 October 1965 at the Disney studios in Burbank, California, with location scenes shot in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Production was completed under the working title The Gnomobile, and the spelling was changed to The Gnome-Mobile shortly before release.¹

Walt Disney was the producer, with James Algar as co-producer. Edward Colman was director of photography, Norman R. Palmer the editor, and the special effects were by Eustace Lycett and Robert A. Mattey, with Peter Ellenshaw as matte artist. Theatrical screenings were paired with the Disney short documentary The Legend of the Boy and the Eagle.¹^•²

Cast and connections

Walter Brennan, an Oscar-winning character actor who had appeared in Disney's Those Calloways (1965), played both grandfathers: the tycoon D. J. Mulrooney, owner of the title car, and Knobby, the elderly gnome. According to the Walt Disney Family Museum, Brennan, who had lost most of his teeth in an accident years earlier, played Mulrooney with his teeth in and Knobby with them out.⁵

Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber, advertised in the credits as "the Mary Poppins kids," appeared together as siblings for the second time after playing Jane and Michael Banks in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964).¹ The film was the final screen appearance of both Garber and Ed Wynn. Wynn, known for voicing the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland and playing Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins, died of cancer on 19 June 1967, one month before the New York debut. Garber died of pancreatitis ten years later, at age twenty-one.¹^•⁵

The Sinclair novel

The film adapts Upton Sinclair's only children's book. AFI's catalog dates the novel to 1962, while a 2022 scholarly study by Dimitra Fimi, a scholar of fantasy literature, dates it to 1936 and describes it as Sinclair's only children's book, written after he lost the 1934 California gubernatorial election, during a road trip in which he saw the Californian redwoods for the first time.¹^•⁶ The Walt Disney Family Museum adds that Sinclair himself had approached Walt Disney with the story in 1937, possibly as a fantasy follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and that the film was one of the last produced by Disney in his lifetime, released about seven months after his death.⁵

In the novel, the child protagonist is twelve-year-old Elizabeth with her young uncle Rodney, and the last two gnomes of the redwoods are named Bobo and his grandfather Glogo; the Disney adaptation changed a number of the book's characters and themes. Fimi's study reads the book as an early children's story with an ecological message, engaging with deforestation and conservation well before Dr. Seuss's The Lorax (1971), while also celebrating the automobile and technological progress.⁶

Reception and home video

Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times in July 1967 after a Saturday matinee among child audiences, reported that the children especially liked the gnome scenes, noting that Disney's technical tricks made "the little people look like they're right there with the big people," and praised Brennan's performance and the special effects.⁷ Tony Mastroianni of the Cleveland Press wrote that the film "sags a little at the end but kids will find it fun most of the way," and singled out the auto chase sequence as one of the wildest and funniest put on film.⁸ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer of 59% from two critic reviews.⁹

The film was released on video in 1985 and on DVD in 2004, and is available for digital purchase.²^•¹⁰^•¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films before 1970

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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