La machine volante

Seeing as I do love Disney and Donald is one of my favourite animated characters, I saw The Flying Jalopy as part of my Donald Duck short marathon, I've also had one for Mickey, and Goofy and Pluto are to come in due course. While not one of Donald's very finest, The Flying Jalopy is very entertaining. The animation is beautifully detailed and vibrant, the mountains are especially impressive, and the music is characterful and energetic with lovely orchestration also. The story as ever is simple and told and paced in a lively fashion, and it is interesting and entertaining to see the lengths taken by Ben to put Donald in peril. The Flying Jalopy is somewhat atypical though, while entertaining Donald is not at his very best not being in a situation that leaves him annoyed or easily frustrated. And there is his adversary, Ben Buzzard, a very telling character who couldn't be more different from Donald's other adversaries, apart from causing chaos(the worst the other adversaries came to against Donald) this marks the first time anybody actually tries or wants to kill Donald. Even with that angle, The Flying Jalopy does thankfully avoid showing this in a overly-sadistic and violently distasteful(The Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoons should have taken notes from this). The voice work is very good as ever. All in all, entertaining though different to what we usually see from Donald Duck shorts, but could've worked in its favour or against it, good thing to know is that The Flying Jalopy fell into the former camp. 9/10 Bethany Cox