The foreword to this remarkable volume takes the form of a page-size reproduction of the cover of Mickey Mouse Magazine, selling, in July 1936, for 10 cents. Donald Duck, much taller than his more famous co-star Mickey, is dressed in a top hat and tails. He is staring proudly at a mud-spattered poster that reads “Donald Duck for president”. Mickey, standing beside him, conceals a handful of mud behind his back.
Mickey Mouse was the embodiment of the phrase “the century of the common man”. He was the little fella, surviving against all the odds. Donald was something different. He was the leader of the awkward squad.
A Mickey Mouse fan site analyzing the character of the duck says, “Donald is characterized as a cocky showboat with a brash and juvenile personality. Along with his semi-unintelligible voice, Donald’s most dominant trait is his short temper, which is predominantly expressed through explosive outbursts and fits of quacking and squawking. Much of Donald’s anger stems from his exceptionally bad luck, though his misfortunes are often the karmic result of his own arrogance and greed.” These words were written, it is perhaps necessary to say, long before the recent presidential election in the land of the free.
Just as the Donald could appeal to the snarling, quacking, squawking frustrations of the cash-strapped voter in 2024, so the duck in the 1930s was designed to bring a chuckle of recognition from the depressed rust belt of his day. Donald Duck was a product of the Great Depression. An American critic in the 1930s observed: “One night we go to the theater and a duck comes out on the screen and he does everything we have always wanted to do. He resents life and says so. He resents authority and refuses to submit meekly. He revolts. He storms. He rages.”
Just as the Donald could appeal to the snarling, quacking, squawking frustrations of the cash-strapped voter in 2024, so the duck in the 1930s was designed to bring a chuckle of recognition from the depressed rust belt of his day.
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: The Ultimate History — the maddest book I read last year — has a message for us. “Nothing succeeds like success, as the saying goes. But in the case of Donald Duck, the opposite is true: no other film star was left in a pile of rubble for the end titles more often, and no other comic hero’s ambitions were so regularly thwarted … Donald is the embodiment of all our imperfections,” write the authors JB Kaufman and David Gerstein.
I say the book is crazy. If you do not believe me, you must realize that it is a heavy folio, a coffee table book the size of a coffee table, containing critical essays and plot summaries of every single Disney film in which the duck makes an appearance, starting with the 1934 cartoon “The Wise Little Hen.” The volume is richly illustrated with garish stills from the duck’s greatest hits, story sketches and background paintings as well as an abundance of images of Walt Disney.
The character of Donald Duck emerged slowly. Initially he was little more than a waddle-on part in Mickey Mouse cartoon films, but it was his “terrible temper” that enabled him to emerge as a superstar. A big break for him occurred not on film but in print when Walt Disney’s The Life of Donald Duck was published in 1941. The anonymous author of this “authorized biography” was none other than Ted Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss.
Donald Duck merchandising — dolls, gramophone records and the like — made him more popular. As in the case of the Trumps, the duck’s rise was aided by the gradual appearance of his unlikely entourage of family — nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, his uncle Scrooge McDuck and girlfriend Daisy. His young nephews were stooges, vehicles on whom Donald could vent his rages. Likewise, figures such as Gus the Goose and Hortense the Ostrich were of little interest in themselves; like all the walk-on parts in the Trump drama, they were foils. We wanted to see how they would react to, or be verbally mauled by, Donald.
Mickey — “that damned mouse”, as George V called him — and Donald are the 20th-century equivalents of medieval animals in a bestiary. Although more cunning than larger predators might guess, they are essentially little people, disguised as animals, shaking their fists at authority.
The authors quote two critics of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) argued that popular entertainment, especially cartoons in the cinema, contained the explanation for the decline of the West. These movies, they believed, explained why dictators had been so successful in taking over the reins of power. “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment,” they wrote. The duck was “an almost symbolic representation of the downtrodden masses in modern industrial society”.
“One night we go to the theater and a duck comes out on the screen and he does everything we have always wanted to do. He resents life and says so. He resents authority and refuses to submit meekly. He revolts. He storms. He rages.”
I would add that these cartoons, in a debased way, played the same role for mid-20th-century cinema audiences that the great tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles played for Athenians during the ups and downs of the Peloponnesian Wars — namely that you can’t escape fate. The Greek tragedies, and the Disney comedies, depend on the opposite of suspense. Whether it is noticing a carelessly placed bucket of water and knowing that it is going to be upset over someone’s head, or watching Agamemnon coming home to his wife, the audience satisfaction derives from seeing the inevitable long before the hapless duck or member of the bloodline of Atreus is able to do so.
As well as his life on screen, Donald Duck was a figure in strip cartoons in newspapers, appearing in one American periodical or another, usually The Herald Statesman, every day from 1941 to 1981. The number of films was seemingly endless. In a movie that perhaps anticipates our Donald, “Donald’s Golf Game” (1938), the duck is on the links, constantly losing his temper over minor irritations. He has a particular hatred of birdsong. His nephews egg on his rage with trick clubs and a hollow golf ball with a grasshopper hidden inside. Disney buffs remember the film for an underwater shot, animated by Johnny Cannon, showing Donald “driving” a ball in slow motion through the watery depths.
In a scene more reminiscent of a contemporary Democratic rally than a real Donald Duck moment, in the 1939 film “The Autograph Hound” Donald goes to Hollywood to collect the signatures of his favorite stars and finds, instead, that Greta Garbo, Mickey Rooney and the like are falling over themselves to meet him. This suggests that the Disney team rather forgot the point of the Donald joke: namely that the duck was meant to be anarchic and against the system. During the Second World War he even appealed to the patriotic instincts of Canadians to put their savings into war bonds. After Pearl Harbor Disney invented an alter ego — Donald’s Better Self, who engages in Faustian dialogues with a “Devil Donald” and emerges as a patriot who puts his selfishness and petulance to one side for the war effort.
Sober political analysts today, likewise, express the hope that in his second term of office President Donald will forget his selling point — unpredictable displays of anarchic passion — and become a boring, responsible statesman. If the temptation to do so ever crosses his mind, we can only hope that he settles down one afternoon, to a feast of takeaway burgers, to watch his namesake in the 1940 cartoon “Fire Chief.” In this film the duck, formerly a member of Mickey Mouse’s fire brigade, has seized control of the outfit. He manages to set fire to his fire hose.
“One of the visual highlights,” our critics remind us, “is animated in long shot by Hal King: Donald, unaware that the fire hose has become knotted, aims it at the conflagration while the blocked hose swells behind him into a monstrous water balloon, then bursts, releasing a torrent of water.” Bring it on.
A. N. Wilson is the author of Dante in Love and the former literary editor at The Spectator
