Disney’s irascible star

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34047, 10 January 1976, Page 10

Disney’s irascible star

ROSS MADDEN

He was the most unlikely star to break on to the Hollywood scene — badtempered, cocky and belligerent. Even his creator regarded him as “a combination of all the people I ever disliked.”

Yet today, 40 years after he first hit the world cinema screens, Donald Duck trails only fractionally behind Mickey Mouse as the most popular of all Walt Disney characters. And there have been times when his fan mail has outstripped Mickey’s by reaching more then 7000 letters a week. Indeed, the magical appeal of Donald Duck even mystified Disney himself. "Mickey is a lovable character, and children can identify with his good qualities,” he said shortly before this death in 1966. “But Donald is different. He’s a pretty mean critter.” Donald Duck was born late in 1934 and appeard on world cinema screens for the first time the next year. By then the Disney organisation had set up business in Hollywood, financed largely by the runaway success of Mickey Mouse six years earlier.

But Disney was a perfectionist and perfection

was expensive. He would examine almost every frame personally and sometimes ordered a cartoon to be redrawn four or five times. On one occasion he scrapped work which had taken 600 men and women six months to complete. Donald Duck was one of a band of immortal characters Walt Disney invented in the midthirties — years when he seemed to live almost entirely in the wonderful world he had created. Once, watching his staff stream towards the car park after a day’s work, he remarked incredulously to an assistant: "Are they all going home?” The man pointed out that it was 5.30 p.m. but still Walt shook his head.

“All those wonderful things to be done,” he muttered. “And they’re going home ...” It was at one late-night ideas session that Donald Duck was bom. Walt and some of his animators were listening to the effects of an imitator named Clarence Nash. One of the voices he produced suddenly excited

Disney. “It’s a duck blowing its top,” he said. “We could use that.” Nash was added to the payroll and began to develop the voice that was to make Donald Duck a childhood legend for the next four decades. Then Disney and an animator, Fred Spencer, worked to fit a body to the voice. “I think he should be kind of cocky,” said Disney. "And since he’s a duck and likes water, how about giving him a little sailor suit?”

Donald was to quack his angry way through more than 120 cartoons, challenging all comers with the line he made his own: “Wanna fight?” Donald’s appearance involved the elaborate care that had been developed by Mickey Mouse’s creation six years earlier.

There were now 700 people on Disney’s Hollywood staff and 16 drawings were needed to show Donald taking a single step.

Master animators would tackle the key drawings — one, eight

and 16 — and the rest were done by technicians known as “in-betweeners” who worked in a cramped studio nicknamed “The Bullpen.” After Walt had approved every detail. Donald went to the ink and paint department where 150 girls traced the sketches on to celluloid transparencies — one for every moving object in the scene. Then the transparencies were clamped under glass and photographed by an overhead camera. Once a character had been perfected, Walt Disney made sure it stayed that way. A stream of memoranda bombarded animators: “Pluto’s ears must rise straight up when he sniffs the ground” -. . . "Donald Duck’s hat must always be at the same angle . . A film historian, Frank Harlow, author of a recent book on film animation, thinks that Donald Duck is, if anything, a more astonishing creation than Mickey Mouse. ‘Tn the beginning Don-

ald had a foul and treacherous temper which was at odds with all the basic thinking about children’s cartoons. Subsequently he was made into a blander character and personally I think he lost something in the process.” Today there are Donald Duck fan clubs, and countless toys, comics and annuals devoted to the noisiest and most belligerent of Walt Disney’s immortal creations. It was the revenue from Donald, Mickey and the rest which enabled Disney, in 1935, to finance his first milliondollar movie, “Snow White.” It was a make-or-break time and Charlie Chaplin, a friend of Disney’s, invited Walt over to Universal Studios “to study the books and learn how to make big money.”

When it hit the screen, “Snow White” exceeded even Disney’s dreams. It made four 'times its cost on its first time on the circuits.

“After that,” Disney recalled later, “Charlie came over and studied OUR books .”