Donald's Lucky Day Part 3

Let's look at the animation in this cartoon. Ed Love takes care of the set-up with the bad guys animated in silhouette. He's makes things work in profile so they read clearly for the audience. If you watch closely, there's sloppy clean-up and assistant work on these characters. Since they're painted black, I'm sure that the studio didn't waste any of their best assistants on these scenes. Love's animation here is adequate, but he really isn't given much to work with.

Jack Hannah's Donald is very appealingly drawn and somewhat streamlined for the times. He doesn't go overboard with wrinkles in clothing, which is fairly common in '30's Disney, or lots of scalloping of Donald's feathers.

If you compare Hannah's scenes with Johnny Cannon's, which follow, you'll see what I mean. Cannon does some nice finger popping and rhythmic walking, but I find his drawings of Donald too busy. The detail detracts from the motion.

Hannah returns with some strong acting as Donald reacts to the radio's warnings about Friday the 13th. Then Hannah animates Donald crashing through a mirror and smashing into an applecart, after which he searches for his package. The applecart scene is just excellent. The action is well-staged and the acting that follows is marked by some great contrasts in timing.

Paul Allen's animation of Donald trying to get around the black cat is well-choreographed, but it isn't as strong as it would be a year later in Mr. Duck Steps Out.

One of the reasons I decided to do a mosaic of this cartoon was because it featured animation by Al Eugster. I had the pleasure of knowing Al and working with him when I was starting out. While I knew he worked on this cartoon, I wasn't sure which scenes he did. I should have looked more closely. The takes Donald does in scenes 50 and 54 are very similar to the takes Al used for Donald in Clock Cleaners. He also does some perspective animation of the background in scene 55, fairly rare at this point in the 1930's. Al's drawings of Donald resembles Jack Hannah's in their lack of extraneous detail and solid draftsmanship.

Don Towsley is another Disney animator who doesn't get mentioned much, but he was a key Duck man in the 1930's. His work here is very solid, though the re-use annoys me. His is the only sequence where Donald really interacts with another character in an extended way and he handles it well.

Dick Lundy's Donald looks like a throwback to an earlier design. Lundy was important in the development of the Duck's personality and later directed Donald Duck cartoons, but his work here on Donald is fairly basic. However, the scene where the cat wrestles with the bomb is a small classic of straight-ahead animation. It's ironic that the cat is as belligerent as Donald usually is; in this cartoon Donald is pretty sedate. It didn't occur to me until just now how out of character Donald is in this cartoon. That's another strike against the story.

The end of the cartoon is a duck's breakfast of different animators that depends more on gags than on acting. As I mentioned last entry, the end leaves a lot of story elements hanging and the gag isn't strong enough to compensate for that.

This isn't a classic by any means. If you compare it to the work coming out of other studios at the time, it is far more slickly done. However, the story construction and acting in this cartoon, especially coming after Snow White, is disappointing.

Donald's Lucky Day Part 2

According to Hans Perk, this cartoon was written by Carl Barks, Jack Hannah and Harry Reeves. After Barks left Disney, he went on to write and draw decades worth of Donald Duck comic books which are held in the highest regard.

There are at least four elements in this cartoon that are common in Barks' comic book work. The gangsters that motivate the plot are similar to the Beagle Boys, enemies of Scrooge McDuck. Barks had Donald attempting to succeed at various occupations numerous times in his comics. The black cat in this cartoon is similar to many trouble-making animals in Barks' comic book work. Finally, the topic of luck plays a large part in Barks' stories, though Donald usually has bad luck compared to Gladstone Gander, whose effortless good luck drives Donald crazy.

It's impossible to know if these elements in this cartoon originated with Barks. It's quite possible that Barks drew on his experience at Disney and re-used ideas and themes that worked, regardless of who created them.

For all the Barks-like elements in this cartoon, the story is something of a mess. There's no comic justice in this film and many story elements are left hanging. The gangsters who motivate the story are pure exposition. I suspect that they were done in silhouette because they disappear from the cartoon after setting up the story; by keeping the characters in the dark, the audience can't get involved enough with them to care that they're gone.

It would have been relatively easy for the bomb to go off in a way that damaged the gangsters or exposed them to the police. That would have brought them back at the climax and created the potential for more comedy.

Donald's efforts are not what save him. He's a passive observer of the climax. All the effort he's expended to deliver the package or get rid of it does no good whatsoever. I guess that's where luck comes in, but he would have been luckier if he lost the package immediately and saved himself a lot of effort.

Finally, the black cat who is the instrument of Donald's salvation never gets thanked or rewarded. The cat vanishes from the film once the bomb goes off, even though showering Donald with fish presented a good opportunity to reward the cat. The gang of cats that swarms Donald doesn't relate to anything and is just a gag tacked-on for the fade-out.

Jack King was not a director with a good head for story. He should have sent this one back for more work.

Donald's Lucky Day Part 1

This cartoon is available on the DVD set The Chronological Donald Volume 1. More about it in future entries.