This review of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: The Ultimate History by J.B. Kaufman and David Gerstein (Taschen) appears in the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
An irascible, almost existential victim of circumstance, mechanical devices and mischievous critters, a tempest in his own teapot of fulminating patriarchal rage, Donald Duck took over the world in the 1930s. He was everywhere: in motion pictures, comic strips, books, effigies, dinnerware, clothing and frozen orange juice. He was bigger than big, and he was the only Disney character who was ever funny.
His more sophisticated pictures were made in the late 1930s, but the Second World War was Donald’s heyday. One of the best chapters in Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: The Ultimate History is on Donald’s participation in the war. There were quite a number of cartoons in which he enlisted, or tried to enlist, in the military: ‘I come from a family of aviators!’ he tells a sceptical recruiting sergeant. Disney characters led human lives – they had jobs, girlfriends, drove cars and lived in houses, so naturally they were
liable for military service. If they didn’t make it into uniform, they at least experienced wartime shortages (rubber tyres were often quite a problem for Donald). The Disney studio was transformed practically overnight into a propaganda machine: is there much difference between an aircraft factory and a movie studio? War was going to be big business, and there’s a photograph of Walt outlining his plans for it with a great big smile on his mug.
In 1943 the studio released Der Fuehrer’s Face, an all-out effort to mock and humiliate the Nazi high command, Mussolini and Hirohito, and starring Donald Duck. If these highly unpleasant caricatures (Hirohito: buck teeth and glasses, Göring effeminate, Mussolini with a Chico Marx accent) sit uncomfortably now, it’s well to imagine what the world was up against. Der Fuehrer’s Face is unusually inventive for Disney, and the public went crazy for it: Donald lives in a weird Europe, where the fences, telephone poles, road signs and even trees are shaped like swastikas. We find him asleep but already Heil-Hitlering. In his poor little house he has to breakfast on a slice of wooden toast, coffee made from a single bean on a string which he keeps in a safe, and from an atomiser, ‘Aroma de Bacon and Eggs’.
The cover of Donald Duck, Four Color Comics 4 (1940), published by Dell. © 2024 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
His bedroom is stuffed with Nazi regalia – the minute hand on his alarm is raised in a permanent Nazi salute and when the cuckoo clock opens the bird has a Hitler moustache and it too is saluting. A silly oom-pah band squeezes into his house and escorts him to a munitions factory by kicking him there. The plant is all stacks and smoking chimneys like cigars, with swastikas on them. The factory whistle steams ‘Heil Hitler!’ and Donald is beset by blaring loudspeakers ordering him to work faster and faster… when he finally gets the heebie-jeebies his eyes become psychotic whorls. Now he’s in a fever dream of artillery shells that form their own oom-pah band and he has to salute a massive bomb with the face of the Fuehrer! A thousand Donalds on the conveyor belt get hammered by an angry shell… cue explosion, and all the little Donalds re-enter his body, where he’s safe in his own bed in American flag pyjamas.
What if the Disney studio had always produced pictures like this? They could have been the Spitting Image of their day, satirising society right along. Instead, in the 1950s, they reverted to provoking Donald with the same old pairs of chipmunks or cutesy insects: weirdly, the bigger Disney stars are more ‘human’ than the lower creatures that annoy them.
Donald Through the Years sericel (1994), created by Walt Disney Studios artists for Donald Duck’s 60th anniversary. © 2024 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
The experience of reading a Taschen book of this thoroughness is luscious. Walt Disney’s Donald Duck measures 40 x 30 x 6 centimetres and if you ever dropped it on your foot, you’d be madder than Donald ever got. There’s great generosity in the conception and production: page after page devoted to beautiful background paintings (the artists now credited, thanks to the authors, who toiled for seven or eight years in the enormous Disney archive), and several chapters on Donald Duck shorts that never quite got made. One unfinished short from the 1940s has ‘George Washington Duck’ crossing the Delaware. As Donald, who was called ‘Don’ around the studio, became a bigger and bigger star, Walt became over-anxious about finding him just the right escapade.
Much space is devoted to storyboards, the ‘scene sketches’ of how a sequence would be played, and the model sheets – extremely detailed drawings of the ways Donald, in the various stages of his evolution, should walk, react, look sorrowful, register confusion and, all importantly, get steamed. These are fascinating: the tail is described as a mass of feathers on a little bump (is there quite an interest in butts at Disney?), his fingers are to end in wisps rather than the usual white glove, the hinge of his bill should be visible outside his head only when he’s angry, and his clothes were to react along with the rest of him.
Model sheet for Donald Duck’s design (1938), Don Towsley. © 2024 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Standardisation was everything at Disney, and still is, but it’s interesting to watch Donald’s look change over the decades: his beak, originally a phallic trumpet, became short and wide; his sailor hat went from white to blue and there are even instructions to the artists about how that hat should flop, depending on his mood. His nostrils were to be shown only in extreme close-up. All this was necessary because he had to be drawn by so many different animators, in-betweeners, clean-up artists and ink-and-painters. You’re forcibly reminded of the intense labour involved in making these cartoons: a thousand people worked at Disney in the 1930s.
There’s a scene in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) where the new lovers are in a smoky old English cinema palace and the entire audience is positively convulsing at a Donald Duck cartoon. Trevor Howard says to Celia Johnson, ‘The stars can change in their courses, the universe go up in flames, but there’ll always be Donald Duck.’ He didn’t know the half of it.
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: The Ultimate History by J.B. Kaufman and David Gerstein is published by Taschen.
From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.