Watching Donald Duck cartoons from this era of Disney
quickly becomes an exercise in looking at how the animators are working to make
the main duck more interesting. We’ve
seen new adversaries added, like Chip and Dale and different animal
antagonists, and that trend continues with Hook, Lion and Sinker. In this case, it’s a mountain lion and his
son, trying to abscond with…yes, Donald’s food.
It comes to a certain point where you wonder if the Disney
animators got enough to eat. We saw
yesterday that Chip and Dale’s short with Pluto was focused on stealing food,
as most of their shorts are, and in Hook, Lion and Sinker the mountain lion is
laser focused on taking fish from Donald’s cabin. The gags all focus on a pile of fish that
Donald presumably caught in the lake nearby, which the young mountain lion sees
as his older cohort is focused on fishing instead.
Once the giant fish show up, the mountain lions try to find
ways to infiltrate Donald’s cabin to retrieve them. The problem is, in this short Donald is a
fine outdoorsman, with heads of several feisty mountain lions mounted on his
wall. This is not something we’ve seen
from Donald’s character before. Sure,
he’s a fiery tempered duck, but a crack marksman who manages to chase and
destroy his adversaries? Sounds more
like the Punisher than Donald Duck.
It’s for that reason that the rest of the short doesn’t
exactly ring true. The lions are
bumbling fools, at least the way they are portrayed, and Donald is pushed as
the heavyweight who outsmarts them.
Again, this doesn’t ring true with what we’ve seen of him in other
shorts. The lions are not something
we’ve dealt with before, but using them in this way does not make them
compelling characters. Look at Chip and
Dale. They are not menacing, but they
are portrayed as silly, yet ultimately effective characters. It’s a polar opposite approach to Hook, Lion
and Sinker.
There are certainly good gags in the short, such as the
buckshot constantly being picked out of the lion’s behind and chasing the lions
through the forest. The problem is that
the viewer can’t connect to the lions, because their intent is ultimately evil,
and it’s taking away from Donald. He
hardly appears in this short, which means that the lions need to be the
compelling characters. It’s an inversion
of the typical Disney formula that might work as an experiment, but ultimately
fails to entertain.
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