Winter Storage

In their fifth animated short, Chip 'n' Dale drive Donald Duck nuts over acorns. The chipmunks are coming up short laying up their supplies for the upcoming winter when they notice park ranger Donald planting just what they need, acorns. This leads to a slapstick battle as the chipmunks try to steal Donald's nuts, he steals them back and they get involved in a slapstick hockey game with acorns instead of pucks. This was Chip 'n' Dale's third battle of wills with Disney's reigning duck star, and once again they prove the perfect foil for his short temper. As voiced by Dessie Flynn and James MacDonald, they're also the only animated characters harder to understand than Clarence Nash's classic Donald. That's part of the fun, or course, as the chipmunks' deliver turn dialogue into a high-speed, high-pitched storm of words usually ending with only one or two intelligible sounds. For contemporary audiences, this is the rare animal melee in which Donald comes out as the good guy, trying to preserve the forest by re-seeding. Though their objectives seem ecologically unsound, however, Chip n' Dale are so darned cute it's hard not to root for them.

By: Frank Miller