There are three types of classic Donald Duck animated shorts. The first features Donald alongside his friends and family, whether hunting ghosts, going on a road trip with Mickey and Goofy, or going to all-out war with his nephews (when he hasn’t stolen all their money). Let’s call that subset ‘Domestic Squabbles’, wherein our Duck’s congeniality is most fully on display (if only just).
We’ll call the second “Incensed by Objects”, in which Donald struggles with inanimate objects in a way that makes old infomercials seem tame. In ‘Drip Dippy Donald’, a leaky faucet drives an exhausted Donald to existential despair, while in 1937’s ‘Modern Inventions’, our Duck is hounded by a robot as he samples (and is harangued by) house-of-the-future style inventions. In these stories, Donald is often the author of his own sorrows, his frustrations escalating and compounding the initial problem.
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The third—and most pertinent for today’s review—we’ll call “Terrorized by Critters”. The whole of nature seems to have it out for Donald Duck. From exotic lions, gorillas, and penguins to the suburban Chip and Dale, Figaro, and Pluto, Donald has been hounded (no pun intended) by a veritable zoo’s worth of the ferocious and the cute and cuddly.
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This third camp of Donald stories influences Fréderic Brémaud and Federico Bertolucci’s lush new book, Donald Duck’s Vacation Parade, out this week from Fantagraphics.
Vacation Parade is an almost uncanny study of those old Duck shorts, capturing the exact format of the classics and delivering a gorgeous new adventure that feels so spot-on that the reader might feel as if they’re simply experiencing a sort of graphic novel adaptation of a classic.
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The book kicks off with a touch of ‘Drip Dippy Donald’ when Duckburg’s early morning hustle and bustle proves too noisome for Donald to sleep. The only clear solution is for Donald to take flight (pun, again, unintended) into the wilds surrounding the city. The true majestic beauty he finds there is complicated – as things always are with our everyduck – by a who’s who of Donald irritants. Humphrey the Bear is there, as are our beloved Chip and Dale. Even lunch-thieving ants are on hand (though, thankfully, not the extremely problematic ones).
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Vacation Parade might be the closest thing to a new ‘classic’ short a reader is likely to experience not only because of its adherence to (and celebration of) those old characters and tropes. What Bremaud and Bertolucci have produced exhibits the craftsmanship of the old Disney Animation studio, which painted lush and gorgeous backgrounds against which its ink-and-paint characters acted. There isn’t a panel in the whole book that doesn’t feel fully realized and masterfully crafted. What’s more, there isn’t a panel of the book that doesn’t feel somehow animated, their subjects captured mid-action. This is a book that could be made up of individual cells of one of those old cartoons. Its wordlessness contributes to this feeling; the reader experiences a sort of interior soundtrack as Donald throws a fit. One can almost hear the high-pitched false language with which Chip and Dale argue.
Comics fans expecting a touch of Barks’ Duckburg may be disappointed, but Vacation Parade is so gorgeous that it nearly transcends its medium and its implications: this is the everyduck at his most distilled and iconic. This is a book that could only come from the somewhat forgotten traditions of the Disney Short.
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