The New Spirit

The New Spirit did not begin as a cartoon idea. It began as a problem at the Treasury Department. Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. was preparing for a tax base that would grow by roughly fifteen million first-time filers, most of whom had never seen a Form 1040 and had no particular affection for the idea. The department wanted the increase framed as a contribution rather than a penalty, and it wanted the money to arrive on time. Disney was hired to make that case in seven minutes.

The studio put two of its senior directors on it, Wilfred Jackson and Ben Sharpsteen, and the film was in theaters on January 23, 1942. That is a fast turnaround by any measure. Distribution went through the War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry rather than the studio's usual channel, which is why the short sits slightly apart from the numbered Donald releases of the same year.

The one creative argument on record concerned the star. Morgenthau did not want Donald Duck. He asked for a new character, a plain figure to stand in for the average taxpayer, on the theory that a familiar comic would make the subject look unserious. Disney refused, arguing that the studio's biggest name was the whole point: if the tax form had to be made tolerable, the duck was the tool for the job. Disney won.

Watching the film, it is hard to see how the Treasury's version would have worked. An invented everyman has no history with the audience and no temper to play against. Donald arrives with both. The short spends its first minute on his enthusiasm for the war effort, then lets that enthusiasm collapse the moment the radio tells him what the contribution actually is. The joke depends on a character the audience already knows to be short-fused and self-interested, and it lands because he ends up doing the right thing anyway.

Structurally the film breaks in two. The front half is a domestic comedy. Donald dances to a patriotic number, a radio announcer asks whether he will do his part, and the answer is a resounding yes until the announcer names income tax. From there the announcer talks him through the simplified Form 1040A with help from an animated dip pen, an inkwell, a blotter and a notepad, all of which have opinions. Donald fills in the blanks, and then, rather than trust the mail, races to Washington to hand the payment over himself.

The office-supply sequence is the best animation in the reel. The pen and inkwell are given the kind of personality the studio usually reserved for props tormenting Donald in the regular shorts, except here they are on his side, nudging him line by line through the form. It is instructional animation in the literal sense, and it is far more watchable than it has any right to be.

The back half drops the comedy entirely. Donald's money becomes a montage of munitions, ships, planes and combat vehicles aimed at the Axis, and the announcer closes on the Four Freedoms against a red, white and blue sky. The tone shift is abrupt. Time magazine's reviewer noticed the same thing in 1942, granting that the cartoon did not make the new form entirely clear but got its point across through laughter, and calling the result, as cinema, "a most effective job." That is about right. The montage is competent and loud; the duck is the part anyone remembers.

By the department's own measures the film worked. Income tax payments in 1942 arrived more promptly than in any previous year. Historians citing Gallup data put the theatrical audience above sixty million, and the number of returns filed roughly doubled over the year before. Whatever share of that belongs to the cartoon rather than to the war itself, the Treasury clearly believed it had bought something useful.

Sixty million viewers, twice the filings, and a bill Congress refused to pay.

The awkward number was the budget. Members of Congress declined to appropriate the $80,000 the production cost, and the Treasury had to find the money elsewhere. The refusal became a small political story in its own right, and it is a useful reminder that even a film this popular was not universally regarded as a proper use of public funds. The department paid, the film ran, and the argument over whether a cartoon duck should be on the government payroll went on without affecting the outcome.

The New Spirit was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary at the 15th Academy Awards, one of well over twenty films in a category that ended in a four-way tie among The Battle of Midway, Kokoda Front Line!, Moscow Strikes Back and Prelude to War. Calling a seven-minute Donald Duck cartoon a documentary was a stretch even in 1942, and the nomination reads today as recognition of the film's reach rather than its form. The studio's actual cartoon Oscar that year went to another Donald short, Der Fuehrer's Face.

The Treasury came back a year later. The Spirit of '43, released January 7, 1943 under Jack King, dramatized the same message with a thrifty duck and a spendthrift duck fighting over Donald's paycheck, then reused the entire munitions montage from this film for its second half. Seen back to back, the two shorts make the economics plain: the comedy was new, the lecture was stock footage. A condensed comic-strip version also ran in Look magazine, with a different ending in which Donald simply mails the form.

The film reached home video on May 18, 2004 as part of the Walt Disney Treasures set Walt Disney on the Front Lines. It is worth seeing there in context with the other wartime material, where it sits as the most cheerful and least combative of the lot: a film whose enemy is not the Axis so much as the taxpayer's own reluctance.