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Rating: Nowadays, when we talk about Walt Disney & co., the staggering namesake multinational company quickly resurfaces in our minds, the sly merchandising, various puppets and figurines, the laughable TV series that led to the success of "icons" like Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers... basically, the entire commercial-capitalistic circus that arose from a simple, trivial scribble of an anthropomorphized rat and evolved over eighty years with additional assorted characters, feature films, great classics, fairy tale adaptations, and today's wonder factory oscillating between Duckburg, McDonald's, and the Disneyland Resorts of Paris and Orlando. Yet, at least during the earthly existence of the excellent Walt, one could perceive the authentic genuineness, basic, lucid, sober, and natural of Mickey Mouse and his cartoon friends, although already confined within the seminal corporation willed by the patron. Cinema was not a bland product of unbridled entertainment, 3D, the glasses, and the digital-real virtuality were not even nesting in the most remote and "Kubrickian" neurons of the most ardent and resolute utopians. Cartoon also meant learning, lesson, teaching: a simple and very straightforward alternative to the inkwell and the beech desk where the hero of the moment who saves the world and fulfills the enchanted princess's dream puts away sequins and magic wands and addresses the young viewer, acting as a "teacher" with the same dose of sympathy and humor as the great feature films.
According to me (and not only me), the character of Donald Duck is far more compelling than the "rodent" counterpart: much less amiable and benevolent than dear Mickey Mouse, with that touch of ironic and satirical politically-incorrect, our Donald is probably the Disney character who best manages to combine seriousness, topicality, and comedy, forging a perfect mix of balance and sincerity, albeit "animated". He fully demonstrates this, for instance, in Donald in Mathmagic Land, a short film for educational and cognitive purposes that attempts to introduce all Disney fans to mathematics, a sort of audiovisual aid to textbooks and abacuses that could remain relevant even in the 2.0 reality of Facebook.
In this (master)piece, Donald, in the guise of a pseudo-poacher armed with a gun and a safari hat, enters a forest of numbers, living pencils playing tic-tac-toe, cascades of multiplication tables, and geometrically squared stones. Feeling lost in such a bizarre location, he is aided by the spirit of adventure who dissuades him from abandoning the "forest" of calculations, which the duck deemed "stuff for nerds." The first step of this learning is Ancient Greece, where Donald explores the Pythagorean relationship between music and mathematics and becomes a member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood; subsequently, the discussion shifts to the five-pointed star, the golden section, the golden rectangle, and their related consequences in classical, medieval, and modern art, as well as in nature. Again, it moves to games, with the mathematical-geometric rules for chess, baseball, rugby, billiards, and carom. Finally, the mind as an extraordinary propeller for theoretical abstraction that, starting from forms and assumptions, realizes the most fascinating engineering. Under the impetus of the investigative spirit and the resolute mathematics, the "doors" of the future can thus be opened.
Donald and mathematics: irrationality tempered and resized by rationality, the animal becoming intelligent and a proponent of ideas, concepts, and fantasies: here's Disney of the "real" cartoon applying his creations to educational learning, to everyday utility, to the science of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Anyone devoid of judgments and evaluations a priori, cannot help but endorse the ardent splendor of the "golden age" without too much embellishment and digital-virtual convolutions, dense with real intentions.
From here, a faint tear for the good old times (gone) by. Au Revoir.
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