You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Donald Duck’ category.
Director: Ford Beebe
Release Date: January 11, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘Donald’s Decision is Walt Disney’s third short to persuade the Canadian public to buy war certificates.
This film has the same two-part formula as ‘The Thrifty Pig‘ and ‘7 Wise Dwarfs‘ from 1941. The first half combines reused footage from two Donald Duck shorts from 1938: ‘Self Control‘ and ‘Donald’s Better Self‘, but with altered voices. The second half resembles that of ‘The Thrifty Pig‘ and ‘7 Wise Dwarfs‘.
The result is less convincing than in the earlier two cartoons, probably because the source material is weaker. Neither ‘Self Control’ nor ‘Donald’s Better Self’ belong to Donald Duck’s best. Besides, Donald only reluctantly does his part, in great contrast to the optimistic pigs and dwarfs from the earlier shorts. Indeed, when Disney had to convince the American public for government purposes, the studio came up with completely new animation for its biggest star (in ‘The New Spirit‘ and ‘The Spirit of ’43‘).
Watch ‘Donald’s Decision’ yourself and tell me what you think:
Director: Dick Lundy
Release Date: January 29, 1943
Stars: Donald Duck
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
In the vibrant opening scene of ‘Donald’s Tire Trouble’ we watch Donald zooming with his car through the mountains with an incredible speed. Then he suddenly gets a flat tire.
In trying to fix it, practically everything goes wrong that can go wrong: Donald has trouble with the jack, the tire patch, the tire itself, and the wheel. Miraculously, he finally manages to fix the one, but then all his tires go flat…
‘Donald’s Tire Trouble’ is without doubt one of the best Donald Duck shorts dealing with Donald’s struggle with inanimate objects, and arguably Dick Lundy’s best Donald Duck cartoon. Instead of milking one gag, like he did in ‘The Village Smithy‘ and ‘Donald’s Garden‘ from 1942, he continuously proceeds from one gag to another, which leads to an impressive string of gags unseen in his earlier cartoons. Moreover, most car drivers will relate to Donald’s frustrations, which will be way more familiar than his problems in the earlier cartoons. The result is an exuberant short, more fit to the World War II era.
Watch ‘Donald’s Tire Trouble’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 39
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Der Fuehrer’s Face
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Flying Jalopy
Director: Jack King
Release Date: December 18, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck, Pete
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
Donald is a bellboy at a chic hotel. He’s hindered in doing his job by Pete’s mischievous son (yes, Pete has got a son in this cartoon).
Pete manages to stay calm, but not Donald. In the end, Donald is fired, but he gets his chance to spank the wicked brat.
‘Bellboy Donald’, penned by Duckmen Carl Barks and Jack Hannah, is one of the better Donald Duck cartoon of the early forties. You won’t find any better interplay between Donald and Pete, with the exception maybe of ‘Trombone Trouble’ (1944).
Moreover, the cartoon contains some remarkably flexible animation of a type rarely seen in a Disney cartoon.
Watch ‘Bellboy Donald’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 37
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Sky Trooper
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Der Fuehrer’s Face
Director: Dick Lundy
Release Date: July 12, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck
Rating: ★★
Review:
In ‘Donald’s Garden’ Donald is a gardener, wearing a straw hat. We watch him having trouble with a water pump and with a gopher, which eats all his vegetables.
‘Donald’s Garden’ is a slow and boring cartoon. It’s hampered by particularly uninspired backgrounds, and it is one of the weaker entries in the Donald Duck series.
It has the same structure as ‘The Village Smithy‘ from earlier that year: it consists of only two situation gags: one with an inanimate object (the pump), and one with an animal (the gopher). Apparently, director Dick Lundy favored these types of gags, for they returned in ‘Donald’s Goldmine’, and in ‘Donald’s Tire Trouble‘, Lundy’s only successful cartoon in terms of situation comedy.
‘Donald’s Garden’ is the first Disney cartoon trying to be funny with gophers. But like the later Pluto shorts ‘Bone Bandit‘ (1948) and ‘Pluto and the Gopher‘ (1950), the studio doesn’t succeed. One may wonder whether gophers are funny, at all.
Watch ‘Donald’s Garden’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 33
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Donald Gets Drafted
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Donald’s Gold Mine
Director: Jack King
Release Date: April 10, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey and Louie
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
The world is covered in snow, and Donald goes for a sled ride, wearing a ridiculously broad fur overcoat.
He purposely ruins Huey, Dewey and Louie’s snowman by sledding right through it. They seek revenge and build a snowman resembling Donald around a rock. This feud leads to a snow-fight between admiral Donald on a battle ship made out of ice and his three nephews on an ice fort.
‘Donald’s Snow Fight’ is a classic Donald vs. his nephews cartoon, but the complete film is quite slow, due to Jack King’s tame directing. Despite some excellent gags, it doesn’t live up to ‘The Hockey Champ‘ (1939), the other classic winter cartoon featuring Donald and his nephews, or ‘Truant Officer Donald‘ (1941), which also features a battle between Donald and his nephews.
The short’s excellent story is by Carl Barks, who reused its theme two years later in his Donald Duck comic WDC 44-442.
Watch ‘Donald’s Snow Fight’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 31
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: The Village Smithy
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Donald Gets Drafted
Director: Dick Lundy
Release Date: January 16, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck
Rating: ★
Review:
In ‘The Village Smithy’ Donald is a blacksmith who has to fix a large cartwheel and to shoe a stubborn female donkey. He succeeds in neither in this remarkably unfunny cartoon, which is one of the weakest within the whole Donald Duck series.
Long situation gags became a common feature of Disney shorts during the rise of the character comedy, in cartoons like ‘Mickey Plays Papa‘ (1934) and ‘Moving Day‘ (1936). Arguably, this time of comedy reaches its nadir in ‘The Village Smithy’. In it only two situations are milked to the length of the complete cartoon, with tiresome results. The wheel scene is the most interesting of the two, if still far from funny, and tributary to the spiral spring scene in ‘Clock Cleaners’ (1937).
The most interesting feature of this otherwise boring cartoon are its backgrounds, which belong to the first oil backgrounds in a Disney short, and which give the film a distinct, gloomy look. Donald, too, has a unique yellowish tan throughout this picture, setting the cartoon apart from all other Donald Duck shorts.
Watch ‘The Village Smithy’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 30
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Chef Donald
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Donald’s Snow Fight
Director: Jack King
Release Date: November 6, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck, Pete
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
Sky Trooper’ is the third of six shorts dealing with Donald in the army.
The cartoon starts where ‘Donald Gets Drafted‘ ended: with Donald peeling potatoes. And like in the former cartoon Donald Duck wants to fly.
Sergeant Pete gives him a chance, letting him do some ridiculous test and sending him up to be a paratrooper. Unfortunately, Donald doesn’t want to jump and clings to Sergeant Pete. They both end up falling without a parachute but with a huge bomb in their hands. Surprisingly, they survive the fall, because in the end-shot we can see them both peeling potatoes.
‘Sky Trooper’ is surprisingly similar to the Woody Woodpecker cartoon ‘Ace in the Hole’ from five months earlier. However, the cartoon is an improvement on the former two Donald Duck army cartoons. The next ones would even be better…
Watch ‘Sky Trooper’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 36
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: The Vanishing Private
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Bellboy Donald
Director: Jack King
Release Date: September 25, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck, Pete
Rating: ★★½
Review:
‘The Vanishing Private’ is the second of the Donald in the army cartoons. Like the first, ‘Donald Gets Drafted‘ from four months earlier, it features Pete as Donald’s adversary.
In the opening shot we watch Donald singing the theme song from ‘Donald Gets Drafted’ and painting a huge canon in ridiculously bright colors. Sergeant Pete tells him to make the canon hard to see. Donald does so by using invisible paint from an experimental laboratory. He accidentally falls into the bucket of paint himself, making himself invisible and driving Sergeant Pete mad.
‘The Vanishing Private’ suffers because of two reasons:
1) the invisibility makes Donald all too powerful. It’s therefore hard to sympathize with him, and not with poor Pete. This is a problem shared by other invisibility cartoons, like the Tom & Jerry cartoon ‘The Invisible Mouse‘ (1947).
2) The other Donald army cartoons are all about the pains and annoyances of normal army life, which is absolutely part of their fun. But the subject of ‘The Vanishing Pirate’ is so unlikely, one can hardly relate to it.
The result is not a funny cartoon, making ‘The Vanishing Private’ arguably the weakest of Donald’s army cartoons.
Watch ‘The Vanishing Private’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 35
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Donald’s Goldmine
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Sky Trooper
Director: Jack King
Release Date: May 1, 1942
Stars: Donald Duck, Pete
Rating: ★★½
Review:
The attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, suddenly smacked The United States into war. The war changed the life of many American citizens, including cartoon stars.
Donald Duck was the fourth of these to support the war effort on the big screen, following Porky Pig, Barney Bear and Popeye, who had joined the army and navy, respectively, in July (‘Meet John Doughboy‘) and November 1941 (‘The Rookie Bear, ‘The Mighty Navy‘). Moreover, Popeye had already engaged the enemy in February in ‘Blunder Below‘. Donald was soon followed by Pluto (May 22), and Woody Woodpecker (June).
In ‘Donald Gets Drafted’, Donald enthusiastically signs up for the army, because he wants to fly, especially after seeing posters of very attractive air hostesses in uniform. His rather naive enthusiasm soon is lowered, when he first has to go through a rather rude medical examination only to end up in the infantry, where he’s bullied by sergeant Pete. Donald doesn’t make a very good soldier, much to Pete’s frustration, and ends up peeling potatoes.
‘Donald Gets Drafted’ is the first of six Donald Duck cartoons devoted to Donald’s career in the army. It introduces Pete as Donald’s sergeant, a role he would fulfill in three other of these war cartoons. The Donald Duck army cartoons are noteworthy for their ambiguous propaganda. Donald is far from a model soldier, and the cartoons makes quite some fun of the army superiors, in the form of Pete. It’s difficult to see them as army advertisements. Moreover, five of the six cartoons are devoted to Donald’s timid life at the training camp. Only in his last war cartoon, ‘Commando Duck’ (1944) would Donald leave American soil to kill some enemies.
With its humor being still quite mild, ‘Donald Gets Drafted’ is not the funniest of Donald’s army cartoons. It is noteworthy, however, for revealing that Donald Duck’s second name is Fauntleroy.
Watch ‘Donald Gets Drafted’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 32
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Donald’s Snow Fight
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Donald’s Garden
Director: Jack Kinney
Release Date: January 1, 1943
Stars: Donald Duck
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
In ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ Donald is apparently a citizen of ‘Nutziland’, a fascist country where even trees and clouds are swastika-shaped.
Donald is awoken by a silly march band singing the sarcastic title song (penned by Disney composer Oliver Wallace and sung with gusto by Spike Jones). Then he has breakfast that consists of only one coffee bean, ‘aroma de bacon & eggs’ and a slice of wooden bread. All too soon he has to work at the assembly line, making shells and saluting to images of Adolf Hitler.
In the end, it appears that it was all just a dream, and Donald, in his Stars and Striped-colored room, sighs, embracing a golden copy of the statue of liberty: “Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America”. This closing scene is rather corny and the satire of the film misses some points: most of the (German) citizens of Nazi Germany were not poor and did not have to work like slaves, as is suggested here. Instead, the Nazis used forced labor forces from their occupied territories.
Nevertheless, ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ was both artistically and commercially the most successful of the Disney war time propaganda films. It even won an academy award for being the best animated short of 1943. It’s so successful, because, unlike most other propaganda shorts, it’s outrageously funny: its satire is so zany, its depiction of ‘Nutzi land’ so wacky, and the scene at the assembly line so out-to-lunch, that one cannot stop laughing. When Donald goes mad, these segments are even topped by a brightly colored, rather avantgardistic and very surrealistic stream-of-consciousness-like scene, which resembles similar dream sequences in ‘Dumbo‘ (1941) and ‘The three Caballeros‘ (1944).
This short was not directed by any of the two regular Donald Duck directors of the time, Dick Lundy and Jack King, who both preferred a more unassuming type of humor, but by Jack Kinney, who is most famous for directing Goofy, and who was undoubtedly the wackiest of the Disney directors, of which this film certainly is proof.
Watch ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Donald Duck cartoon No. 38
To the previous Donald Duck cartoon: Bellboy Donald
To the next Donald Duck cartoon: Donald’s Tire Trouble
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 