Bee on Guard

Donald Duck suffers the usual indignities of having to be on guard from bee attack in BEE ON GUARD, an amusing entry in the Donald Duck cartoons of the '40s and '50s.

The bees are on a mission led by a King Bee and decide to land in Donald Duck's garden while he's there doing his gardening chores. Donald knows where the hive is, guarded by a funny looking bee who asks each entrant for a password. Donald is rebuked when he tries to gain entry and comes up with the foolish notion of disguising himself as a bee so the dumb guard will talk to him while he plans to steal the honey.

The dumb guard has a voice like "Gus-Gus" from "Cinderella". He falls asleep after Donald has managed to siphon all the honey from the hives while having chit-chat with him. The bees return, led by the King Bee, and are angry to find the hive emptied. The bee guard is given his walking papers.

Fortunately, he traces the theft to Donald's house, gets the goods on Donald and heads back to be treated like a hero by his fellow bees.

It's amusing enough, but lacks the style of the early bee pictures with "Buzz-Buzz" as his main enemy. Animation is up to the usual Disney standard.

I didn't remember Donald's doubtful character, I thought he was just grumpy, not without character, and the rogue species that wants to take advantage of other people's efforts, how ugly Mr. Donald...

A Walt Disney DONALD DUCK Cartoon.

The BEE ON GUARD at the entry to a castellated honey depository becomes suddenly aware of a certain Duck with a mighty big sweet tooth.

This was one of a small number of films to feature the competition between Donald Duck and Buzz-Buzz the Bee and is fairly typical of the entire lot. For some reason, the Disney animators altered the Bee's persona here, making him more rotund & silly, rather like a tiny Oliver Hardy. And why does his hive have a King Bee, rather than a Queen? As always, Clarence Nash provides Donald with his unique voice.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was always intrigued by pictures & drawings. As a lad in Marceline, Missouri, he sketched farm animals on scraps of paper; later, as an ambulance driver in France during the First World War, he drew comic figures on the sides of his vehicle. Back in Kansas City, along with artist Ub Iwerks, Walt developed a primitive animation studio that provided animated commercials and tiny cartoons for the local movie theaters. Always the innovator, his ALICE IN CARTOONLAND series broke ground in placing a live figure in a cartoon universe. Business reversals sent Disney & Iwerks to Hollywood in 1923, where Walt's older brother Roy became his lifelong business manager & counselor. When a mildly successful series with Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was snatched away by the distributor, the character of Mickey Mouse sprung into Walt's imagination, ensuring Disney's immortality. The happy arrival of sound technology made Mickey's screen debut, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928), a tremendous audience success with its use of synchronized music. The SILLY SYMPHONIES soon appeared, and Walt's growing crew of marvelously talented animators were quickly conquering new territory with full color, illusions of depth and radical advancements in personality development, an arena in which Walt's genius was unbeatable. Mickey's feisty, naughty behavior had captured millions of fans, but he was soon to be joined by other animated companions: temperamental Donald Duck, intellectually-challenged Goofy and energetic Pluto. All this was in preparation for Walt's grandest dream - feature length animated films. Against a blizzard of doomsayers, Walt persevered and over the next decades delighted children of all ages with the adventures of Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi & Peter Pan. Walt never forgot that his fortunes were all started by a mouse, or that childlike simplicity of message and lots of hard work always pay off.

Disney and Donald Duck are always worth watching. Bee on Guard is not among their finest hours but if the short is nice enough it does its job well, and that's what Bee on Guard does. The story is nothing original and gets to a slow start and the supporting characters are just there and don't have much to do. Donald however is as charismatic and funny as ever and his personality is complimented nicely. The bee is rather dumb but amusing enough and he works well with Donald. Bee on the Guard has some amusing and well-timed gags if never not having much that is laugh-out-loud hilarious. The animation is full of lovely colours and fluid detail, which makes it very beautiful to watch, while the music is lush and characterful.

Overall, unexceptional but amusing and colourful enough to entertain and to warrant it a watch or two. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Master gardener Donald Duck notices the bees who pollinate his flowers have a huge hive and that means honey. He proceeds to work out a method of stealing it by misleading the bee who guards the place. One thing leads to another and Donald finds himself on the short end of the stick once more. There were so many of these bee films.