Okay this was certainly…different,
but in a good way.
This short took a few views before I warmed up to it, but it
happened. As I said it’s different than
some of the others mostly, because I feel like Donald dropped acid before it
started. It’s basically about Donald letting
his imagination run away with him while reading a book and listening to the
radio. This allows for some fun
animations like his chair morphing into an ape, and a lot of fun character
designs with the characters coming out of the books. I found it jarring on first watch, because the
shorts tend to be more grounded than this.
Grounded in cartoony logic yes, but still grounded. In ‘The New Neighbour’ for example both Pete and
Donald exist in the physical space, can hurt each other in cartoony ways, and the
story has a straight forward progression.
This tosses all that out the window. Donald goes through different scenarios with
the radio, while the book characters are dealing with a story about stolen
pearls at one point the author himself comes out to defend Donald and flips to
the back of the book to look up who the thief really is. Pauline the dame disappears in the detective’s
coat looking for her pearls and somehow he never notices it. To even get that book in the first place a
guy came to Donald’s door selling subscriptions, and just when I was asking why
the hell anyone would be going door to door in the rain his voice switches as
he starts going about a bicycle he could win, takes Donald for a ride on said invisible
bicycle, crashes it, changes voices again as he complains that Donald bent the wheel,
and then disappears completely, but the books that spilled everywhere remain. It’s just nuts.
I think the reason I’ve grown to like it is that Donald gets
so into it that I started getting into it too and had a ton of fun. I love the visual gag of Pauline thinking she
spots her pearls only to pull them out to reveal a pair of handcuffs. I love the hot irons gag and that at the end
even Donald isn’t sure what’s real and what isn’t anymore, considering the
pearls are now around his neck. This certainly
won’t be to everyone’s taste since logic and progressive storytelling have
clearly taken a holiday, but if you like sort of head games narration style you’ll
probably like this.
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