Home Defense

The setting is the American West Coast during the war, and the job is aircraft spotting. Donald sits at a listening post with headphones clamped on and a large acoustic horn aimed at the sky, the sort of equipment that real civilian observers used before radar coverage made ears obsolete. Huey, Dewey and Louie are assigned to the gun beside him. That is the entire apparatus of the film: one anxious adult, three bored children, and a piece of hardware that amplifies whatever comes through it.

Released on December 28, 1943, Home Defense was the last Donald short of that year, and by then the studio had made its share of films in which the war was the subject. This is not one of them. Here the war supplies a uniform and a set, and the short goes about its usual business, which is putting Donald in charge of something and watching the nephews take it apart.

Because the film is so lean, it is easiest to describe as a sequence rather than a story. There are really only two set pieces, with a payoff.

• The nephews load a motorized toy plane with gingerbread paratroopers and fly it past the post. Donald hears it through the horn, treats it as the real thing, and shoots it down.
• The parachutes open. Donald, who a moment ago was a hero, sees them drifting down and panics, taking the gingerbread invasion for a genuine one.
• Later, a bee wanders near the horn. Amplified through the headphones it sounds like a squadron, and Donald orders the nephews to fire the cannon.
• The nephews fire it straight into the acoustic horn. The blast travels down the equipment and into Donald's ears, lifting him off the ground.
• The nephews laugh. Donald, suspended by his own headphones, throws the tantrum the film has been building toward since the first shot.

Written out like that it looks thin, and it is. What the list does not convey is the timing. The bee sequence in particular is built on a single sound idea, a small noise made enormous, and the film trusts the audience to understand the horn well enough that no one has to explain it. That kind of confidence in a prop was the Donald unit's specialty, and it carries the reel.

The story credit belongs to Carl Barks and Jack Hannah, a pairing that shows up on a number of the wartime Donalds. Barks would soon be far better known for the Donald Duck comic books than for anything with his name on a film, and Home Defense has the shape of one of his ten-page comics: a single location, an escalating misunderstanding, and Donald's authority undermined by people smaller than him. Hannah went on to direct much of the Donald series himself later in the decade.

Jack King directed, as he did for most of the Donald shorts in this period, with animation by Paul Allen, Bill Justice, Hal King, Dick Lundy, Charles Nichols and Harvey Toombs, and a score by Paul Smith. Clarence Nash voiced all four ducks, which means the nephews' laughter and Donald's fury at the end come from the same throat. The film does nothing showy with color, but it is in Technicolor, as every Donald release of the period was; the drab palette of the post and the flat coastal sky are a choice, not a limitation.

It is useful to set this beside the other Donald films of the war years, because they were not all the same kind of object. The New Spirit and The Spirit of '43 were commissioned by the Treasury to sell income tax. Der Fuehrer's Face was a satire with the Axis as its target. Home Defense is a regular RKO release with a wartime setting, and the distinction matters. Nobody is being persuaded of anything here. The enemy never appears. The only casualties are gingerbread.

The enemy never appears. The only casualties are gingerbread.

That makes the film a better record of how the war filtered into ordinary entertainment than the propaganda shorts are. Civilian spotting posts, air-raid nerves, children playing at soldiers: these were the texture of the home front, and the cartoon treats them as familiar enough to joke about without comment. The one moment that cuts slightly deeper is Donald's reaction to the parachutes. For a beat he believes he has just shot at people, and the film lets the panic play before revealing the cookies. It is a small joke about a real fear, handled lightly, and then it moves on.

Judged as a Donald short rather than as a wartime document, it is mid-table. The premise is better than the payoff, and the ending, with Donald dangling and screaming, is the standard exit rather than a fresh one. But the horn is a good prop, the nephews are used precisely, and King never lets the reel stall.

Home Defense circulated on home video earlier than many of its neighbors. It appeared in 1985 on the VHS and laserdisc compilation An Officer and a Duck, then on May 18, 2004 in the Walt Disney Treasures set Walt Disney on the Front Lines, and again on December 6, 2005 in The Chronological Donald, Volume Two, covering 1942 to 1946. The Front Lines release puts it alongside the tax films and the training material, which is the right company for context but slightly misleading about what the short is: the others argue, this one just plays.

If you are working through the 1943 Donalds, watch it last, as it was released. It closes a year in which the character had been drafted, taxed and sent to fight Hitler in a dream, and it sends him out doing something much more modest, which is failing to run a two-man post with three nephews in it.