The Hockey Champ

This Donald Duck short is wonderfully animated and very entertaining. The story is simple, Donald challenges his nephews to a game of ice hockey leading to all sorts of winter hi-jinks. The winter setting inspires many creative sight gags, and the Disney gang uses them to the extreme. Donald's opening figure skating scene is a great piece of animation.

A perfect 10 for 10

This short animation from the Walt Disney vaults is a must see for any hockey fan enthusiast. The color is fantastic, and the interaction with Donald Duck and his young and rambunctious three (3) nephews on ice skates is such a wonderful piece of cartoon nostalgia that I wished that the new Disney films that get released in the theaters with their half a billion dollar budgets would wow their audiences by showing this 1939 short 7 minute cartoon prior to their main feature film which is what I was used to seeing back in the 1960's.

Parents and children would flock back to the theaters and talk more about the preliminary cartoon short they just saw than the multi-million dollar CGI enhanced feature films that are cookie cutters of the previous years action/adventure films.

I'm always partial to the Disney cartoons set in winter with the quaint Victorian looks to the countryside and enchanting atmosphere (such as 1935s 'On Ice'). It looks brilliant here in this cartoon and I'm pleased to say it's one of the more inventive and clever Donald Duck shorts.

This time round the irritable duck is skating around on a frozen lake when his nephews appear for a game of hockey. He shows off to them his hockey trophy (kept in his jacket) and brags about how he's the best hockey player in the world. As you can guess already, he gets too big for his boots (err...webbed feet) and Huey, Duey and Louie play no end of tricks on him.

If only he would keep his big mouth shut once in a while huh?

Donald Duck teaches his nephews ow to play hockey. Then they teach him that it's not about just skating and hitting the puck accurately in this typically fine cartoon from Disney.

One of the pleasures of watching cartoons these days, instead watching them when I was a kid, dinosaurs roamed the earth and TV screens were tiny -- a couple of years ago, I was in an electronics store, where a sales proudly pointed to a 9-foot screen and asked if I had ever seen a television that size. I replied that we had one when I was four; it was ten feet wide, with the usual 8-inch screen -- is watching beautiful, clean prints -- even in movie theaters, the prints were always at least a bit scratched and dirty -- on sizable screens that offer clarity comparable to movie theaters.

This cartoon is not only fun. It's beautiful.

Not that it is a bad thing of course! My concluding thoughts after seeing The Hockey Champ.. I liked it! It is rather routine and predictable in terms of story and the pacing isn't always secure, but what does compensate is the lovely atmosphere the animation gives, a very Christmassy and nostalgic atmosphere. The music is also absolutely gorgeous, lyrical, smooth and whimsical. There are some good gags, if nothing particularly groundbreaking. Donald is excellent as usual, and his three nephews are as dastardly as ever. Clarence Nash once again does a stellar job with the voicing.

Overall, pleasant but not a classic! 8/10 Bethany Cox