Bee on Guard

Start with the criticism, because it is fair. By December 1951 Jack Hannah's unit had sent Donald against bees three times already: Inferior Decorator in 1948, then Honey Harvester and Slide, Donald, Slide in 1949. Reviewers noticed. The reception summarised on Wikipedia calls the bee storylines repetitive, finds the point of view muddled, and misses the slapstick of earlier Disney cartoons. All three charges stick to some degree. Bee on Guard is the fourth trip to the same well, and the studio was not pretending otherwise.

What the complaint misses is that this one is built differently from the other three. In those, a bee comes to Donald's property and the fight is about territory. Here Donald goes to the bees. He leaves his garden, follows the workers back to their hive and commits a robbery. That flips the moral geometry of the series, and the flip is the most interesting thing in the picture, even if the film is not always sure what to do with it.

It opens as an ordinary gardening short. Donald tends his flowers; the bees arrive and take the nectar; Donald objects. So far, standard. Then he does something the earlier bee films never let him do, which is think. He tracks the bees to the hive, sizes up the Guard Bee at the entrance, and decides that the way in is not force but disguise. A costume is assembled, a false stinger is fitted, and Donald presents himself at the door as a fellow worker.

The Guard Bee buys it. More than that, he likes the newcomer. Pinto Colvig voices the sentry in a gruff, amiable register, and the animators, Bob Carlson, Volus Jones, Bill Justice and George Kreisel, give him a lumbering good nature that makes the con almost painful to watch. Donald befriends him, waits until he dozes, and then quietly siphons the honey out of the stores for himself. The theft is patient and quiet. Hannah shoots it like a safecracking, all small movements and held breath, and it is the best-staged stretch of the film.

The muddled-perspective charge comes from what happens next. The theft is discovered, and it is the Guard Bee who pays: the King Bee banishes him for letting a thief through. From that moment the film belongs to the bee. He goes looking for the duck who ruined him, and the audience is squarely on his side, because Donald has done nothing in seven minutes that a viewer could root for. This is unusual. The series is built on Donald as the aggrieved party, and here he is simply the burglar.

The sentry is disgraced for trusting a friend, and the friend was a duck in a costume. Every sympathy in the film runs against its star.

Whether that counts as a flaw depends on what you want from a Donald short. The critics of the day wanted a duck to root for and a bee to boo, and the film gives them the reverse. Watched now, the inversion is what makes it worth revisiting. Hannah's unit had spent years building Donald's opponents into sympathetic characters, Chip and Dale above all, and Bee on Guard is the point where that sympathy finally tips all the way over. The bee is the hero. Donald is the problem.

The climax is a duel. The Guard Bee finds Donald, and the two square off with their stingers, one real and one strapped on. The fight is short, and this is where the missing-slapstick complaint lands hardest: the earlier bee shorts ended in escalating physical chaos, and this one ends in a brief bout and a chase. The final image, the bee pursuing the duck with Donald's own fake stinger in hand, is a neat idea, since the weapon of the disguise becomes the instrument of punishment. It is also over almost as soon as it begins.

Against that, the animation in the fight is sharp. Bill Justice in particular had a way of drawing Donald's panic as a full-body event, and the retreat here is all flailing legs and displaced feathers. Yale Gracey's layouts keep the hive interior clean and readable, and Thelma Whitmer's backgrounds do the same for the garden. Nothing in the craft is careless. The problem is proportion: too long spent on the con, not enough on the reckoning.

• Directed by Jack Hannah, who had been running the Donald series since Donald's Off Day in December 1944.
• Story by Bill Berg and Nick George; music by Oliver Wallace.
• Animation by Bob Carlson, Volus Jones, Bill Justice and George Kreisel; layouts by Yale Gracey; backgrounds by Thelma Whitmer.
• Voices: Clarence Nash as Donald, Pinto Colvig as the Guard Bee.
• Released December 14, 1951, by RKO Radio Pictures; about seven minutes; Technicolor.
• Home video: Walt Disney Treasures: The Chronological Donald, Volume Four (1951-1961), released November 11, 2008.

Colvig's presence is the credit worth pausing on. He was the voice of Goofy, and hearing that unmistakable rasp come out of a bee gives the sentry a borrowed warmth the character would not otherwise have. It is part of why the audience sides with him. The film is, in a sense, Donald swindling Goofy, and nobody has ever wanted to see that.

A minor short with one good idea and the courage to follow it halfway. The disguise and the slow honey theft are handled with real skill, the moral inversion is genuinely unusual for the series, and the Guard Bee is a better character than the film's running time allows him to be. What it lacks is a third act to match the first two, and the sense that anyone at the studio had a strong reason to make a fourth bee picture beyond the fact that the last three had worked. Worth watching for the con. Not worth much for the fight.