Studio: Walt Disney Productions (Silly Symphonies)
Distributor: United Artists
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
The Wise Little Hen needs help planting her corn for the winter and asks the neighbours. Peter Pig and Donald Duck, who live in a houseboat and belong to the Idle Hour Club, would rather play, so each clutches his stomach and pleads a bellyache. The hen and her chicks plant the corn themselves. At harvest time she asks again; again the bellyaches, until a board falls off the clubhouse and shows the two shaking hands over their dodge. The hen and chicks harvest the corn, cook a spread of corn dishes, and invite Peter and Donald to help eat it; the bellyaches start by reflex, then stop at the word "eat", and the hen hands them a bottle of castor oil instead. As she and her brood tuck in, the two loafers kick each other for their stupidity, and Donald, in his first screen appearance, has his first tantrum.
Why It Matters
- It is the debut of Donald Duck, in his long-billed, sailor-suited first design, dancing the Sailor's Hornpipe and already voiced by Clarence Nash with the quack that would carry the character for fifty years; the castor-oil ending is the first of a thousand humiliations. The hen and chicks' planting and harvesting are animated with the care the Silly Symphonies gave to nature.
- Donald had been a voice without a body since Nash auditioned for Disney in 1933; the studio built the character for this Little Red Hen adaptation and he stole it, so that within months he was co-starring with Mickey in Orphan's Benefit. The Wise Little Hen is therefore the origin of Disney's second-biggest star, and a good Silly Symphony in its own right.
Notes and Trivia
- Florence Gill, the hen, clucked for Disney chickens for twenty years; Pinto Colvig, Peter Pig, was Goofy.
- Donald's birthday is officially celebrated on 9 June, the film's general release date.
- See also: Funny Little Bunnies (1934), Three Little Pigs (1933), Steamboat Willie (1928).
