Donald Duck Ruined Everything?

For some ridiculous reason (to which, however, I've no desire to be disloyal), I really love seeing negative contemporary reviews of things that are now considered classics. With that in mind, here's a piece I found while looking through the new London Times archives. The article, credited only to "our film reviewer," is from April 8, 1953, it's called "Film Cartoons: Recovery After Decline," and is based on the idea that cartoons have consistently been getting worse since Disney's very earliest color cartoons, and that Disney really sold out by creating Donald Duck, leading to terrible cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Tweety, but cartoons now have a chance to get better thanks to the new hope of UPA.

I'm not quoting the critic to make fun of him (all of us are even now writing things that will look weird even a few years later); it's just an interesting look at where the state of cartoon criticism was in the early '50s. The reviewer was really espousing conventional wisdom, that funny-animal comedy/gag cartoons were hopelessly lowbrow. It's a window into why UPA was considered the saviour of cartoons in this period.

There wete once two Disneys: the humorist who amused himself with Mickey and, incidentally, made a most brilliant use of the new invention of sound, and the lyrical versifier -- poet is putting it too high -- who created the entirely successful Flowers and Trees. They worked in close and happy harmony with the nature of the medium they used, and the lunatic distortions, the exaggerated raucousness, the frenzied fantasies, with which Donald Duck assailed the screen were as far removed from the adventures of Mickey as the dubious prettiness of Fantasia was from the flowing, graceful lines of the Silly Symphonies.

It is possible to see Donald Duck as a heroic rebel, a last-ditch individualist, or to argue that he represented the frustrated fury felt by the common man as the thirties drew to their catastrophic close, but, whatever the motive for his peculiar behaviour, it had a disastrous effect on the cartoon. From the pleasant exaggerations of an inventive humour, the cartoon descended to the depths inhabited by Such creatures as "Bugs" Bunny and " Tweetie-Pie," where all is a chaos of insensate physical disaster, and the point and essence of fantasy are lost in wild and witless extravagance.

There were always, however, isolated cartoons, such as the French Joie de Vivre, to keep the true tradition alive, and there are welcome signs to-day that the cartoon is recovering a proper pride in itself. Perhaps the cartoon will always be happiest with animals, and perhaps the human figure, at least if it is drawn as stiffly as Snow White or Cinderella, will always prove something of an intruder into the lovely, animated world of cartoon nature, but the new U.P.A. films at least make their humans expressive, funny and individual. Gerald McBoing Boing may owe his reputation to an entrancing trick with sound, but he is a boy in his own right, and many people number a Mr. Magoo, that bumbling, short-sighted old gentleman with a dash of W. C. Fields in him, among their acquaintance. The cartoon, indeed, may be starting on a new phase. A form of three-dimensional cartoons is promised, and meanwhile Peter Pan is waiting round the corner to write another chapter in the Disney story.