If you grew up a child of the 80s, then odds are even Disney was a big part of it. Whether as an occasional presence that your parents popped into the pre-digital era VCR for you just every now and then, or else as the primary shaper of your Imagination growing up, it's fair to say that the Mouse House had a decent hand in molding how we remember our childhoods in some form or another. For me, it came from two places. Part of its was from the video cassettes my folks bought for me. The other was growing up with a version of the Disney Channel that was a like a version of
Turner Classic Movies if it was geared for the Spielberg generation. You'd have early prototypes of the kind of shows you'd expect to find in a place like that, such as program blocks geared toward airing the classic cartoons featuring Mickey and the gang. You'd also have classic standbys such as
Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers or
Darkwing Duck. Then you'd turn right around and the next thing you know, your kids would get a chance to be introduced to Humphrey Bogart in
The Maltese Falcon, or John Wayne in films like
The Searchers, or
Stagecoach. Then things might shift over to an anthology program called
Lunchbox, which showcased actual independent animation from around the world. After that, you might be introduced to a little known bit of childhood trauma fuel, such as
Flight of the Navigator, or
Dot and the Kangaroo. Coming up next, the scene would switch rails again, and you'd be treated to the sight of James Stewart playing Mr. Smith going to Washington. I'm not kidding, here, by the way, they had actual schedules of this stuff lined up all day.
You can even check out some of the classic Golden Age movies the channel used to showcase back in the day, followed by a heck of a lot more where that came from. What I'm getting at here is that growing up with the Mouse Kingdom back in the 80s was a hell of a different experience from what it is now. It was a lot more fun, for one thing. You got the sense that you were in the hands of entertainers who didn't just know what that word meant, you also got the impression they had some kind of understanding of how much more it could mean with a little effort and honest creativity. Growing up with the Disney Channel in my youth was similar in many ways to coming of age with the help of guys like Jim Henson. There was this implicit sense of understanding that you were having your Imagination expanded and encouraged by the TV folks that your parents allowed to babysit you. One of the programs that contributed to this sense of growing mental horizons also has to count as a product of the original Mouse channel. Yet it also had a physical media copy thrown into the bargain. It wasn't just any routine home video release, either. It was part of an actual line of promotional material that the Company was churning out at the time. The short film I'm here to talk about today saw its first home video release as part of the Walt Disney Mini-Classics line of VHS's. I supposed the best way to describe it is to call it all a specialty brand that saw it its heyday in the years 1988 to 1993 (web).
It was a back catalogue, of sorts, most which were no longer than perhaps 30 to 45 minutes of runtime, yet they seemed like features films in their own right, to a child of 7, at least. The content of each video consisted of one helping from a number of extended theatrical shorts that Walt and his team put into theaters back in World War II, in place of their usual feature-length animated masterpieces. This doesn't seem to have been anything that Disney was ever planning on. Instead, it was all down to a matter of economic necessity. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the nature of the reality around everyone began to shift into a new gear, and the same process held true for the Magic Kingdom. When America found itself catapulted headfirst into the then new conflict, it didn't take long for Hollywood to find itself a willing participant in the War effort against Hitler and what were then called the Axis nations, Italy and Japan. This resulted in Tinseltown grinding out an entire future movie vault's worth of propaganda in the forms of film and short featurettes. Walt's company was no exception to this rule. It was very much as historian Bowdoin Van Riper explains in his edited collection of studies,
Learning From Mickey, Donald, and Walt:
Essays on Disney's Edutainment Films.
"The outbreak of World War II broadened Disney’s involvement with reality-based films. The studio turned out a steady stream of instructional cartoon
shorts for the military—light-hearted in approach, but serious in intent—that
were designed to educate soldiers, defense workers, and civilians on subjects
ranging from recycling and personal hygiene to riveting techniques and the
proper use of anti-tank weapons.10 The studio’s second line of wartime shorts
was propagandistic rather than instructional. Not all the propaganda shorts
were realistic—
Der Fuehrer’s Face plunged Donald Duck into a surreal, night
marish vision of life under the Third Reich—but all sought to present reality
as Walt Disney, and the country’s wartime leaders, saw it. Education for Death
purported to show how Nazi Germany indoctrinated its citizens, beginning in
early childhood. The most ambitious of these wartime propaganda films was
the 1943 featurette Victory Through Air Power. Mixing various forms of animation with stock footage and lectures by Major Alexander de Seversky, it made
the case for aerial bombing as a decisive factor in modern warfare. The demands
of wartime diplomacy—specifically the need to foster good relations with Central and South America—gave rise to
Saludos Amigos! (1943) and
The Three
Caballeros (1945). Mixing animation and live action as Victory did, they too
were designed to make a broad point: that Latin America and the United States
were natural allies, and their peoples similar in culture and outlook (5)".
The minor punchline involved here is that the main reason for all this innovation was the need to keep the Kingdom from financial ruin after Hitler and the Nazis pretty much busted the company's chance for overseas revenue from films like Snow White, Pinocchio, and Bambi. These are all cited as some the studio's best work for any number of reasons. The trick is none of that artistry seemed to have made much of a difference when you're dealing with a mind that's out to lunch. So, the War ate into company profits, and Walt was left having to scramble for ways to keep himself and his life's work afloat. One of the ways in which this was done was through the easy income of making wartime propaganda. The second, and most important way to do that was to create a series of short films. The trick is that if you were to create a number of these pictures (too long for a regular Mickey cartoon, but not long enough for a full-length feature) and paired them together, then however lopsided or dichotomous the final results, you'd still be able to keep the brand alive and remind people that the Disney name was still in the running and part of the overall landscape of Hollywood. It's the kind of strategy that's counter-intuitive in whatever remains of today's industry, yet there must have been some logic in their favor.
Because by combining two or more short films into one package, and placing them in cinema's, Walt somehow found a way to make it all pay off. As a result, this part of his career became known as the Package Era. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to say that Disney was the man responsible for the creation of the anthology feature film. Works like
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, or
Fun and Fancy Free were the result, and later on the short works that made up those anthologies found themselves further repackaged later on down the line as part of the studio's line of
Mini-Classic re-releases. The result was that kids like me got our first exposure to adaptations such as
The Wind in the Willows,
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, or
Mickey and the Beanstalk from this now obscure video series line.
Donald in Mathmagic Land was part of that same lineup for me. The first time I ever saw it was as a copy of VCR era physical media. It was the kind you could hold in your hands. When you unpacked it, there was a switch in the upper lefthand side of the cassette that would allow you to open up the lid covering the entire top half. Once you did that you could see the reels of film the entire picture had been printed on. Somehow our not so distant ancestors managed to pack an entire story onto such primitive tech, complete with a full orchestra and glorious technicolor. It's been a long time since I've stopped to consider some of the remarkable contents of this simple educational video that was designed with children's schools in mind. I'd like to take the time to unpack some of those contents.
The Story.
(Note: The following synopsis is provided by from Martin F. Norden's
A Journey Through the Wonderland of Mathematics, which can be found in the pages of the aforementioned Riper volume of edited critical essays. All of the insights for this article have been drawn from this source).
"A door opens, and a mysterious streak of light pierces a huge darkened
environment. An animated white pintail duck wearing a beige short-sleeved
shirt and matching pith helmet enters the undefined space, casting an enormous
shadow as he does so. Carrying a rifle, he looks about warily. “Mighty strange,”
he says in an immediately recognizable quackish voice. Strange, indeed. So begins Donald in Mathmagic Land, a 27-minute featurette
produced by the Disney studio and released in late June 1959. Starring the eponymous Donald Duck, this episodic, Oscar-nominated film combines animated and
live-action sequences to introduce its viewers to basic math concepts, a history
of mathematical thinking, and the relevance of math to music, art, architecture,
nature, sports, board games, and other aspects of everyday life (113)".
"The Alice-in-Wonderland qualities of Donald in Mathmagic Land are evident from the very start. Within moments after Donald’s unexplained arrival
in the number-bedecked terra incognita, he follows footprint-like numerals on
the ground, which the film quickly reveals to be the work of an entity that
would be quite at home in Alice’s imaginary world: a bird-like, backward-walking, pencil-headed creature. The creature wordlessly challenges Donald to a
game of tic-tac-toe. The creature uses its pencil head to make its marks on a
crosshatch it etched on the ground, while Donald uses the barrel of his rifle to
make his. The creature defeats Donald in mere seconds, prompting the exasperated duck to complain, “What kind of a crazy place is this?” He hops over
a waterfall-fed stream that features cascading numbers that divide into smaller
numbers when they strike rocks in the stream, and he ends up in an odd forest
filled with trees bearing (and baring) roots bent at ninety-degree angles. “Well,
whaddaya know! Square roots!” he exclaims. He then encounters a collective
creature that exhibits some thematic resemblance to Alice in Wonderland’s
Cheshire Cat: a circle, a triangle, and a rectangle perched on a tree branch. The
geometric figures, each with their own set of legs, coalesce to form a single creature that, like the Cheshire Cat, imparts information from on high to the
story’s lost and confused protagonist.
Unlike the cat, whose grin is the first and
last thing the audience sees, the composite creature’s mouth appears only after
the three animated geometric shapes come together. After the creature recites
the value of pi—erroneously, as it turns out—its mouth disappears and it splits
back into separate geometric shapes.29 It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland moment,
to be sure. Lest any viewer miss the connection, Donald’s “Hello?” that echoes
through the bizarre countryside immediately thereafter sets the stage for
another reference. The disembodied voice of the True Spirit of Adventure
answers the wayward waterfowl and tells him where he is. Donald exclaims,
“What’s next?” to which the Spirit replies: “A journey through the Wonderland
of mathematics (119-20)".
An Annoying, Yet Necessary Detour on Context and Historical Debate.
I came into this reviewing knowing I would have to focus and rely on at least two aspects of vital background information. I had to find out whatever I could on the making of this now iconic short film. I also had to give myself at least some kind of useful grounding within a particular branch on the family tree of mathematics. To be specific, I had to see if I could gain some useful knowledge about the philosophy of numbers in order to be able to tackle the subject matter of Walt's film with at least something like the thoroughness that it deserves. Both tasks have proven to be something of a trip down a dizzying, and sometimes contentious rabbit hole. I came into this review expecting to collect no more than whatever relevant information I needed for the task at hand. What I found for my troubles is a somewhat neglected piece of studio history, and the knowledge that I've entered into a topic in the annals of Math and/or the Science where there are still disagreements on the question of both origins, and even of what these potential beginnings even mean. As might be expected, it is the latter subject, the one that more or less acts as the guiding principle and scientific foundation for Walt's film, that has turned what should have been the usual round of fact finding into its own labyrinthine journey. It turns out that Walt got his hands on the kind of subject that expands far beyond the horizons of a kid's film.
I seem to have wandered into one of the many debates that characterize, or constitutes as both the nature and history of Philosophy. Apparently, the kind of subject matter that Walt and his team were digging into with the making of this picture included such topics as whether or not there should be any kind of philosophy attached to the problem and practice putting two and two together. The final results aren't as bad as you might think. I've never had a head for figures, yet it's not like all of a sudden I'm stuck back in high school algebra and up the numerical creek without a paddle. Instead, what I've got on my hands is something a bit more interesting. It's more akin to learning that all of the lessons the grown-ups tried to drum into your head as a stupid freshmen have a much more controversial and open-ended history and meaning than you might have been lead to believe. It means there's a lot of fascinating and much debated historical details to uncover in just a simple Mouse House short subject for school students. It's not the thing I was expecting to happen, yet once it does, it's also kind of interesting, in a mind-bending sort of way. It also means that I've had to devote at least some space in this reviews to just being able to see if I can tease out as much of what went into the making of Walt's numbers picture, and see if it's possible to arrive at any settled conclusion regarding the often combative or quarrelsome debate that has come to surround itself around one key thinker whose work has proven to be as controversial as it is definitive in the field of mathematics. With that in mind, let's start out simple before getting complex.
When it comes to the making of
Mathmagic Land, it took a while before I was lucky enough to stumble upon Riper and Norden's work. They remain the two best sources I've been able to find for how the story of Donald's adventures in the Land of Numbers came to be made. As you might expect, this is as close as I can get towards giving you any idea of how the film came about. According to Riper, it was the exposure to the necessity of having to make propaganda films during the War that gave Walt his first taste of what it was like to both work with live action film, and to do so within the confines of the documentary format. This proved to be not jut a good educational, but also a somewhat profitable experience in and of itself. It allowed Walt and his team to get their feet wet in terms of learning to to use cameras and location filming in all of the ways the rest of their Tinseltown competitors had been doing since roughly the start of the Silent Era, for one thing. For another, it allowed Walt the means to discover a handy outlet for making a lot of quick profits the studio was in desperate need of in order to stay afloat during what proved to be one of its big financial slumps. The War wasn't kind to Walt in several ways, and that's a topic worth discussing at length in and of itself. For now, what matters is that after the Fog had lifted, and America once more found itself on a peace time footing, Disney hadn't forgotten the lessons he'd learned from having to produce live-action oriented documentary film work.
The results of this practice appear to be very much as Riper tells it. "The decade immediately following the end of the war brought major
changes to Disney Studios. One was Walt Disney’s decision to begin producing
live-action features, which promised lower production costs and higher profits
than costly animated features. The second was the launch of a weekly Disney
anthology series on the ABC television network in the fall of 1954. The third
was the opening of Disneyland, the first Disney theme park, in 1955. All three
of these developments created new demand for films, and new opportunities
for bringing them to a wide audience. It is no coincidence that the immediate postwar period (roughly 1945–1960) was the heyday of Disney’s documentaries
and docudramas.
"The leading edge of this postwar wave of reality-based Disney films was
the
True-Life Adventures series of nature documentaries, which began with
Seal
Island in 1949. Elaborate productions focusing on a particular animal (such as
The African Lion) or environment (such as
The Vanishing Prairie), they featured
full color footage shot entirely on location, often in tight close-up or slow
motion. Walt Disney insisted that they be factually accurate, but in practice the
nuggets of fact were wrapped in layers of storyline, careful editing, and anthropomorphic narration. Designed to make the films appealing to audiences, these
elements made the films more artificial than their publicity suggested. The
True
Life Adventures series eventually encompassed 13 films, eight of which won
Academy Awards, before it ended with Islands of the Sea in 1960. Ben Sharpsteen,
who produced twelve of the thirteen, also produced a parallel
People and Places
series that began with
The Alaskan Eskimo in 1953. As the series title suggests,
these 30 minute featurettes did for geography what the
True-Life Adventures
did for natural history. Focusing on exotic areas such as
Siam (1954),
Switzerland
(1955), and
Lapland (1957), they combined elements of two traditional documentary forms: the travelogue, and the popular ethnography. Three of them
won Academy Awards for best documentary short subject:
The Alaskan Eskimo
in 1953,
Men Against the Arctic in 1955, and
The Ama Girls (about life in a Japanese fishing village) in 1958.
"The
Disneyland television series, which premiered on 27 October 1954,
was designed to mesh seamlessly with the studio’s theatrical releases and the
new Disneyland amusement park, then under construction. Old theatrical
releases from the studio’s vaults provided a cheap source of quality programming to fill the weekly broadcasts, and documentary shorts from the
True-Life
Adventures and
People and Places series fit its hour-long format especially well.
Short documentaries showcasing the park and its attractions also became a regular feature on
Disneyland, as did “behind the scenes” shorts that introduced
audiences to the process of movie-making. The behind-the-scenes programs
fell into three broad categories. The first, like “The Story of Animated Drawing”
(broadcast November 30, 1955), showed the process of animation, and used
cartoon shorts from the Disney catalog as illustrations. The second, like “A
Cavalcade of Songs” (broadcast February 16, 1955), featured Walt Disney dis
cussing a particular element of the studio’s cartoons, again using clips from the
vault as supporting evidence. The third, like “Operation Undersea” (broadcast
December 8, 1954), chronicled the elaborate efforts of Disney camera crews to
shoot on location: in northern Scandinavia for the
Lapland entry in People and
Places, for example, or underwater for
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
"The flexible structure of the Disneyland program—four rotating weekly
themes: Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland—
meant that individual elements could be combined and recombined in different variations. The True-Life Adventure films, for example, were first released theatrically, then broadcast multiple times on television, and finally used as a source
of footage for compilation programs like Nature’s Better-Built Homes. Footage
of the primary camera crew shot by the second-unit crew could, meanwhile,
become “behind the scenes” documentary shorts of their own. Disney thus had
the luxury of paying the costs of a filmmaking expedition once, then reaping
the benefits multiple times. Disneyland also featured original programming, produced for and originally aired on the television series. The most ambitious were a series of documentaries about science and technology, designed to mix animation with
live-action footage and serious educational segments with comic relief.12 Six of
these hour-long programs—three about space travel and one each about high
ways, aviation, and nuclear energy—eventually aired, along with a three-part
series of more traditional documentaries tracing the U. S. Navy’s involvement
in the exploration of Antarctica. Just as the True-Life Adventures found a second
life on television, several of the made-for-television documentaries were recycled as theatrical releases. Our Friend the Atom was screened as a featurette in
European theaters, and footage from the three Antarctica episodes was edited
into a People and Places film titled The Seven Cities of Antarctica (5-7)". There's one extra bit of programming that Riper somewhat neglects.
Maybe this is because it gets a proper airing in its own chapter essay later on in the collection, yet it's worth summarizing for a minute. That's because I'm sure it's possible to make a case that the Tomorrowland
Man in Space series (along with
Our Friend the Atom) has to be considered as something of a training ground for what would eventually become the exploits found in
Mathmagic Land. The
Atom episode is something that deserves to be brought up further on down the road, as it almost functions as the Yang to
Donald's Ying in this case. For now, it's enough to say that Walt's interactions with the staff and workers at NASA who were busy at the time trying to put American boots up on the Moon as part of the Space Race must have been something of an exciting, and needless to say, very creative experience for the Nine Old Men and the co-creator of Steamboat Willie. I can't help but think that one of the benefits of their collaboration with NASA was that it showed Walt and his animators just how far they could push their own techniques to the point where it was possible for them to at least try and suggest the Romantic aspects of the real world around them. Indeed, it may be that one of the unspoken reasons as to why Walt became so eager to work with the Space Agency is because it offered him the chance to prove that his blend of inherited Romanticism and Fantasy tropes could be spoken of as having both a thematic and practical applicability to the real world outside of his films.
The man was nothing if not a consummate idealist, and it's a point he seems to have tried to get across in countless and varying ways throughout his life. With the
Man in Space episodes, he might have realized that he'd found a way of expanding the scope of his vision. If there's any kind of validity to these musings, then the one thing that should be kept in mind is that the NASA shows were the starting point of the trend that Riper talks about. Walt's efforts on
Mathmagic Land, meanwhile, seems to work better as a culmination, of sorts, for what he was looking to accomplish in this field. If this is the case, then it begs the question of what is it in the subject of mathematics that Walt thought could serve as the perfect vehicle for his own blend of fact with Enchantment? Here's the part where we've reached the second aspect of this short film, and its also the bit where the facts begin to get a little more up for debate. For the next few remaining paragraphs of this subsection, everyone's mileage might have no choice except to vary based on what you regard as the historical facts of the case. So far as I'm able to tell, Walt found all the Inspiration he needed from the life and thought of just one man. This somewhat shadowy figure is known as Pythagoras of Samos. It should be noted that I am uncertain as to whether this is his first or last name. Let that stand as the first clue of the muddled debates surrounding him.
For an interesting host of reasons, this guy has become one of those figures who is capable of sparking sometimes heated arguments. Most which stem from the often frustrating lack of historical documentation that surrounds or else occludes, veils, and then engulfs him. In the short film proper, all we're given about this philosopher goes as follows. Norden writes that " Just as Donald...initially looks as if he is
in the midst of an Adventureland safari", he is then "whisked away to ancient Greece to
learn about Pythagoras, pentagrams, and the relationship of mathematics to
music, so too would Magic Kingdom visitors be transported to the theme
park’s various lands and learn from their exhibits and installations (121)". A more fleshed-out description of Norden's summation is that the aforementioned Spirit of Adventure asks the Mouse House's resident Duck if likes music? When Donald replies that he does, the Spirit tells him, "Well, without Eggheads, there would be no music". This unseen force then proceeds to spin Donald around like a top, revealing him to now be garbed in clothing that would roughly approximate how a citizen of Athens might have looked or dressed some years just after the time of Homer. "Come one", the voice of Boris Badinov encourages Donald, as our audience surrogate. "Let's go to Ancient Greece. To the time of Pythagoras, the master Egghead of them all".
With these words the background behind Donald fades into an abstract artistic representation of Grecian artwork and ruins; the kind of the thing that you might expect to find in a well made UPA cartoon, in other words. It's here that Walt gives us all he knows about this enigmatic wizard of numbers. When Donald asks who Pythagoras is, Paul Frees informs us in voice-over that he is "The Father of Mathematics and Music...You'll find mathematics in the darnedest places". We're then treated to a brief demonstration of the Octave Ratio, along with the claim that it was Pythagoras who had a hand in discovering the science behind it. Maybe nothing too controversial so far, yet the night is young. From there, Frees narrates about how "You can imagine how excited Pythagoras was when he shared his findings with his pals, a fraternity of Eggheads, known as the Pythagoreans. They used to meet in secret to discuss their mathematical discoveries. Only members were allowed to attend. They had a secret emblem, the pentagram". During all this description we are introduced to animated avatars of Pythagoras (here represented as a somewhat stocky, bearded figures) and his sect of intellectual friends. The interesting irony about this sequence for me is that Walt introduces hints about the levels of censorship and tyranny that the philosopher and his acolytes were subjected to, thus necessitating the need for meeting in secrecy, and the creation of the pentagram as an esoteric sign of group recognition.
This does seem to have been part and parcel of the tales told about Pythagoras, so it does mean its appearance here in what is ostensibly a children's cartoon is somewhat striking from an adult perspective. At the same time, I'm left wondering how far Walt was willing to take these hints of the clashes between Liberal Education and any and all possible tyrannic forces who would try and stand against it. It's a topic well worth exploring, even within the confines of a discussion of the history of mathematics. However, no sooner has Walt brought this aspect of history up then he quickly moves the narration and its attendant action onward with more or less no look back. From here on, the focus remains on the topic of Math proper, with all of Pythagoras and his potential history left to the wayside. If all of this sounds minor to a layman, then I'll have to admit it's easy to see your point. For all I know it probably is, and yet it is precisely this undergirding principle behind everything Walt and his team do with this short subject that has been attacked for being inaccurate for a varying number of reasons. Some of these attacks don't just center around the presentation of the life of Pythagoras, however fleeting they are in context. It has also extended to the way certain mathematical concepts, such as the Golden Ratio in it's application to Bronze Age centric Greco-Roman architecture such as the Parthenon, are portrayed. There have been skeptics making the case that neither Pythagoras nor the Ratio had anything to do with the construction of either Greece or Rome. This is where things stand on that front.
The whole thing comes off to me as this strange sort of quagmire that I wasn't even aware of until I started to look into background info for this simple Magic Kingdom short film. If I'm being honest, I'm still sort of mildly stunned by how much vehemence has been spilled over in ink (both literal and digital) in debating the reality of this one, single mathematician from a bygone era. The trick here for me comes in once you realize that the same dearth of historical detail applies to the ancient number cruncher's fellow Classical Eggheads. We know no more about the lives of such philosophic giants as Plato or Aristotle than we do about Pythagoras. It's true we catch mention of these men and their activities in the histories of Xenophon, and even exist as targets of satire in the plays of Aristophanes. However, it is difficult for me to tell what separates the veracity of these recorded accounts from the ones detailing the teachings of Pythagoras and his school. To me, the nature of the setup here seems to be very much a combination of the clear-cut and the speculative all at once.
If my own two cents on this matter are needed, then here's what I think. I'd argue it makes sense to claim that a philosopher by the name of Pythagoras once existed way long ago. Things get complicated real fast beyond that point, so it's best to streamline what I think about this guy. It's not something I thought I'd even have to do going into this review, so of course, here we are and here I go. In Carl A. Huffman's edited collection,
A History of Pythagoreanism, one of the contributors, Geoffrey Lloyd, creates a list that serves as a neat summation of the extant of this thinker's reputation. It's there he notes that "A
recurrent problem relates to the use of modern categories, even when some of these have ancient precursors. Should Pythagoras be considered a mystic, a sage, a religious leader, a charismatic figure, a guru, a magus or magician, a wonder-worker, a shaman, a philosopher, a cosmologist, a mathematician, a scientist? The scholarly literature is full of attempts to shoehorn him into one or other, or more often into a combination of such categories (web)". Say sorry if this sounds like a broken record, yet this is still the most genuine reaction I have to Lloyd's words. I was not prepared to have all this controversy dumped in my lap. I also wasn't expecting to have to arbitrate all of the mixed and sometimes downright surreal reputations that have attached to Pythagoras's name. The somewhat decent enough news is that this last chore is something I am willing present my own two cents on.
Just as there's no logic to supposing Pythagoras never existed, there is also nothing against the idea that he ever worked in a vacuum. Instead, I'd like to propose that maybe the Classical philosopher of numbers was merely part of a wider intellectual effort afoot in the bronze age to bring the domain of calculus into it's own as an ever self-correcting and improving science. The benefit of placing Pythagoras into a supposed Tradition of Bronze Age Philosophical Humanism is that it allows the thinker his dignity, while also leaving room for the idea that later architects and sculptors such as Inctus, Callicrates, and Phidias (the designers and builders of such structures as the Parthenon) might have based their work off of the findings of Pythagoras, while also perhaps partaking of a wider pool of shared scientific knowledge than the proper study of history has been able to recover as of yet. Such notions may be theoretical, yet all of these conclusions seem to be within the bounds of reason enough to me. I also don't believe for a second that someone like Walt, no matter how taken with the idea of Enchantment as a whole, was ever cloud-headed enough to believe some of the more fanciful folklore that grew up around one of history's most mysterious Eggheads. It may be possible to assume that Pythagoras arrived at a system of metaphysics birthed from his studies in the science of numbers. It's another thing to conclude that this makes him into some kind of mathemagician. There's a fine line between science and nonsense here.
The quality of the number crunching that went on behind the scenes in order to construct the various skits and set pieces that dot the runtime of
Mathmagic Land tells me that Walt's research was able to pay off well enough in terms of usable study material. It's what allowed him to keep in all those elements of Pythagoreanism that still match up well with the reigning paradigm of contemporary calculation, while being able to avoid the more outdated aspects of the Classical Age. All of which sort of leaves us with one final piece of background context that we'll need in order to understand what Walt was up to here. Is it possible to claim that Pythagoras had a philosophy, and if so, what was it? Is there anything about it that is still relevant, and where might that no longer be the case? Yeah, well, just be aware that what I'm about to say next is the best summary of an entire complex system of thought. One that encompasses ideas not just about numbers, but also of how they apply to subjects that we might otherwise consider as unrelated. I don't mean just topics like economics or sports stats. We're talking now about areas such as psychology, behaviorism, politics, and above all, the gaining and study of knowledge. Pythagoras seems to have been one of those thinkers with a holistic view of his field.
He seems to have held that the study of numerals can also go on to tell us a great deal about the fabric or nature of reality itself, and of how we might relate to it. It's all one big, heady subject, as you can guess. Which means there's no way on this, or any possible Earth that I can hope to innumerate all of it. The closest I can come to describing Pythagoras's ideas in a graspable, down-to-earth way it to claim that his thought (so far as I can tell) all revolves around two interrelated concepts. The first might be stated as the relation of Number to the Universe. The second part of his philosophy is perhaps concerned with what, if any, sort of practical application such a link between mathematics and the cosmos has to the trials and concerns of human life? To put it another way, the first part of Pythagoreanism relates to the Order of Things. The second part concerns the relation of any such potential Order to the problems of human nature. Perhaps a better way to express that last part is to say that, rather than dealing with an intrinsic problem, Pythagoras is said to have been concerned with what might be termed the Question of Character. How the personality of any given human subject can said to to correlate or connect to the basic principles, or natural structures and stratums of the world around them. In layman's terms, Pythagoras is believed to have held that mathematics is, at the very least, a key component in the fabric of reality. Therefore the way man orders his life to it is crucial.
It is the
Character built out of the
Choices that a human being constructs for his or herself that determines how well oriented the next person you meet is to the facts (and numerics) of life. At it's core, all Pythagoreanism can be said to do in its honest form is to take the basic concept of Math as a fact, or scientific practice, and build upon it so that the learning and study of the subject takes on a greater pedagogical purpose. In holding that Mathematics is one of the fundamental keys to unlocking the secrets of the universe, Pythagoreanism then proceeds to enlarge the scope of the inquiry beyond that of mere basic calculation. While arithmetical computation remains the bedrock of the Classical form of this paradigm, Pythagoras's theory expands the practical and conceptual outlook to include such questions as the relation of math to not just the field of physics, but also to the realm of politics, and all the way up to the health of the human psyche. It is this willingness to stretch the boundaries of the application of mere calculus to encompass such Olympian heights that often seems to account for the criticism that here we have an example of a philosopher who has overstepped his bounds. I'm afraid I really can't offer much in the way of a comment on that opinion, really. The best response I've got isn't even mine. It belongs to the pages of an essay, by the scholar and critic Christopher S. Butler.
In a chapter of Alastair Fowler's edited collection,
Silent Thought: Essays on Numerological Poetry, Butler acknowledges the difficulty that such a figure as Pythagoras presents for modern scholarship. At the same time, he can't deny that it is precisely this strand of early arithmetical thought which went on to shape the paradigms of later thinkers such as Plato. Butler writers: "Pythagoras and Plato believed that mathematics would
furnish the key to philosophic contemplation of the cosmos, as
devoutly as Russell and others later believed that mathematics
provided the key to the foundations of logic, in the
Republic
we are told that the study of arithmetic must be enforced by law,
‘not cultivating it with a view to buying and selling, as merchants
and shopkeepers, but" to orient the mind of the subject "itself from the changeable to the true and
the real’. For mathematics ‘draws the soul upwards’ from the
changeable things of this world to the contemplation of the
pure Forms, which are its plan. Plato is thus impressed, not
so much by the very extensive practical achievements of the
mathematics of his time, despite the admitted usefulness of mathematics in time of war, but more by the status of number as somehow both underlying and transcending reality. In this he is
indebted to his predecessor Pythagoras (1)".
I'm not sure how all that would have struck Walt if he'd familiarized himself that far with the teachings conventionally attributed to the Sage of Samos. Once more, the paper trail that would tell us any more about not just the background information that went into Mathmagic Land, but also what Disney and the Nine Old Men might have thought about Pythagoras when it came time to read up on what was reported about him, has proven to bit slim on the ground in a way that really grinds the gears of anyone who would like to know more about the history behind this short picture. At the same time, it's like I'm also not too sure how much that mattered for Walt's purposes. Throughout its runtime, the documentary does nothing less than keep its focused centered squarely on the practical applications of Pythagorean thought. We're taught about how Nature itself represents a kind of language that can be scientifically translated into numerical-computational form, and how this in turn relates to the ways that humans have applied math to even our most mundane, and easily recognized pastimes, such as sports and games. In all of this, Walt makes sure that the picture remains nothing more than clear-headed. He doesn't deny that there is a realm of higher speculations to Pythagoreanism, yet it's a topic he's more than happy to leave to others. I also think he must have realized that even the speculative aspect is easily explained.
Once you translate all the most archaic sounding concepts of this philosophy, all that Pythagoreanism amounts to is a branch of the Liberal Humanities tradition of schooling. In its most understandable form, all Pythagoras is held to believe is that the careful study of the Arts and Sciences (with a special focus on the field of Mathematics) can help to elevate the mind of the subject into what might be described as a Completed Character. In other words, all Pythagoras is said to have maintained is that a proper regimen of schooling can sometimes make all the difference for the person's ability to lead a full and healthy life. All it amounts to is a riff on an old adage. It's the one that goes "Catch a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you've fed him for life". Guys like Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras all seem to have believed this applied even up to the field of scholarship, and the acquisition of knowledge. Perhaps its because of this inherently practical orientation of even their highest thoughts that allows Walt to make sure that whatever big Pythagorean speculations are present in the documentary still somehow manage to be graspable in ways that even a child can understand. That's because he seems to have realized that Pythagoras was interested in building up the good life.
Conclusion: A Simple Children's Film with a Surprising Amount of Depth.
I have said that it is the work and philosophy of Pythagoras that Walt used as the guiding principle for his short feature. That's true enough so far as the science behind the picture is concerned. What it still leaves out is the question of presentation. The issue that Walt found himself confronted with went something like this. He'd just assembled all this mass of fascinating numerical facts from the world of ancient history, and the overall quality of his findings was enough to set his Imagination alight. The question then becomes how on Earth do you do the same for your audience of young eyes and ears? In other words, is there a way to get viewers interested in learning about Math in a way that doesn't bore them to tears. I'd argue that even if you're not a fan of this work, then the fact that Disney was able to make it entertaining in some fashion is testimony enough that he was able to achieve a more than decent enough measure of success here. For my own part, I've had great fun coming back to explore this now somewhat obscure and neglected piece of animation from the studio's halcyon days. It might have come from Walt's Silver Age, yet even offerings from that era is more entertaining than how the current owners of the Company are treating all of it.
What seems to have allowed Walt to present the subjects of geometry and arithmetic in a fashion that is able to keep the viewer engaged is the understanding that storytelling is the best way to drive home even the most complex of scientific subjects. It's the same realization that a journalist like Matthew A. Stanley had when it came to researching how Einstein came up with his formulation for the Laws of Relativity. What Stanley found out was that a bare bones description of the father of Quantum Physics formulating his thesis in isolation resulted in nothing more than a dry-as-dust summation of facts that run the risk of seeming to have no bearings on the everyday lives of human beings. However, if you go back and tell the actual story of the context of Einstein's great breakthrough, one where the full narrative is of a genius coming into his own and then having to maintain the integrity of both his paradigm shifting theory and his own worth as a thinker and a man amidst the turmoil of the First World War, then you've got something close to a real life Epic. This is an example of fact as narrative adventure, something the audience can sink their teeth into. Learning about how E equals MC-squared takes on a whole new level of meaning when we learn that it all came about amidst the scientist's struggles with the racism and bigotry that were hallmarks of Great War era Europe, and how it extended further on with catastrophic results from there. Then Relativity becomes a flashpoint in the evolution of thought.
It becomes a saga that is exciting to retell, and may even serve as an Inspiration to future scientists and discoverers one day. This is all gone over as a demonstration of what Walt knew had to be the right way to convey the magic (properly so-called) of mathematics. It's something he already knew about long before Stanley ever had his own brainwave about the best method for conveying the importance of Einstein's life and discovery. You could argue Disney was sort of doing the same for Pythagoreanism. According to Martin Norden, Walt and his team wound up turning to one of their previous source materials in order to awaken the Enchantment of numbers in their young viewers:
"
Donald in Mathmagic Land contains numerous other connections to the
studio’s
Alice in Wonderland, the most conspicuous of which occurs when the
Spirit, moving to a discussion of mathematics and games, invokes the centuries-old mathematical game of chess. While the Spirit observes that Lewis
Carroll, a noted mathematician, used a chessboard for a setting in
Through the
Looking-Glass, Donald finds himself on a large chessboard confronted by various
chess pieces taller than he. The Spirit then engages in a bit of gender-bending
by transforming Donald into an Alice-like figure. Now wearing a light-blue
dress, a white apron, and a headband—the same outfit worn by
Alice in Wonderland’s title character—a bewigged Donald immediately finds himself in trouble; he’s harassed by the red king and the red queen who think he’s a lost pawn,
and he tries to escape, only to be slowed down and then pursued by a red knight.
Still in drag, he is buffeted about the chessboard like a pinball until he does an
ungraceful swan dive off the board. He slides along the floor and crashes into
the front of a large box, its hinged lid open to reveal what appear to be bakery
items and a sign that reads “HURRY EAT ONE.” He grabs one, downs it, and,
in a very Alice-like development, grows incredibly large incredibly fast. He
looks down on the board, and his high-angle perspective allows the filmmakers
the opportunity to use simple animated movements to show how chess is played.
Though the
Donald in Mathmagic Land team had cut a number of visual-design
corners in the process of producing this film, it did so only minimally here; the
similarity of this brief episode’s iconography to that of
Alice in Wonderland is
unmistakable (120)".
I suppose it's fitting, in a way, that in drawing on the surrealist phantasmagorical approach that was a hallmark Charles Dodgson's storytelling, Walt was at the same time aligning himself with one of the most fervent defenders of the Classical approach to arithmetic computation. One of the little known controversies of the Alice author's life is when Dodgson got embroiled in a now somewhat minor dispute about how the subject of Math should be taught in Oxford's academic curriculum. He even went so far as to write a satirical fantasy play about the issue, entitled Euclid and his Modern Rivals. What makes it fascinating to discuss in relation to Walt's educational picture is that the dialogue-debate centric plot of this little known effort is that it showcases Carroll's skills as a fantasist in such a way that the Euclid skit could almost function as an accidental precursor to Donald Duck's adventures in the land of mathematics and music. John C. Butcher is able to give a neat and succinct summation of both the academic controversy in which Carroll found himself embroiled, as well as a greater look at his mathematical outlook in general. To this I would have to add Rebecca Lea Morris's Medium essay, Why Did Lewis Carroll Write a Play About Geometry. What makes her writing on the subject valuable for the purposes of this review is that she is able to highlight that Carroll's defense of Classical calculus is grounded in the high regard he held for the numerical science known as the Pythagorean Theorem.
fans are even given a nice bit of fun, after-the-fact trivia when Morris tells us the sum of the square root of a
right-sided, not an Isosceles triangle. The major difference is she and Carroll both get the equation right in its proper sequence of calculation. Looking back now, it is possible to wish that Walt had utilized Donald to make that same joke way back when. It would have made for one hell of a fun bit of trolling on Disney's part. It gets even funnier when you stop and realize that Walt had purchased the rights to L. Frank Baum's
Oz novels, and was still looking for ways in which to bring the franchise back to the big screen under his own Company banner. Finding out about all this obscure trivia also raises a question in my mind that Norden never even bothers to consider. How much of Carroll's academic work as a well-regarded mathematician in his own right do you suppose Walt might have been aware of? The kick in the teeth here is that this might be one of those hidden goldmines that might be well worth exploring further, and I am unable to find any sort of paper trail that would allow an avenue in which to conduct such a study. In terms of Walt's knowledge of Carroll's Pythagoreanism, all I'm confronted with is little more than a brick wall. While this train of thought does count as a dead end, what can't be denied is the point Norden makes that Carroll left a big imprint on Walt's art.
"The Alice-in-Wonderland quality is even more pronounced in
Donald in
Mathmagic Land’s comic-book counterpart, an important tie-in product. Adapted from the film by a Dell team consisting of writer Don R. (“Don Arr”)
Christensen, penciler Tony Strobl, and inker Steve Steere, the comic book
omits the Donald-on-safari and the Donald-in-drag material but includes a
framing story that explains Donald’s arrival in and eventual departure from
Mathmagic Land. At the start of this framing narrative, Donald finds himself at the mercy of his uncle, Scrooge McDuck. We learn that Donald had borrowed
a mere 89 cents from Scrooge, but the crafty financier had engineered a loan
for his unsuspecting nephew at the eye-popping interest rate of 30 percent.
Donald’s own nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie lend him a book titled
Complete
Mathematics, and he works late into the night hoping to come up with a
solution. The more he reads, the more frustrated he becomes. “Numbers ...
Figures ... Nothing but trouble! I wish mathematics had never been invented!”
he exclaims to no one in particular before falling asleep at his desk.
"His
lamentations are answered by a visualized entity calling itself the “Spirit of
Mathematics,” who leads Donald through a numerical universe far more
detailed than, but otherwise similar to, the one depicted in the film. Donald’s
adventures in Mathmagic Land conclude when a character named Nimble
Numbo (imagine Elmer Fudd clad in Mickey Mouse’s bright red robe and
pointy blue sorcerer’s hat from Fantasia) reveals a secret to Donald that could
help him escape the clutches of his usurious uncle. Armed with this new information, Donald awakens from his dream and tricks Scrooge into agreeing to a
variation on the “wheat-and-chessboard” mathematics problem as a means of
settling his debt. Prefiguring Scrooge McDuck and Money, an educational animated short directed by Hamilton Luske in 1967, this framing story reveals a
pragmatic, dollars-and-cents side to math that is completely lacking in the film
and, more importantly, provides an Alice-like context for Donald’s improbable
sojourn.
"Given the Disney company’s lengthy and ongoing history of cross-pro
motional activities, it is probably no accident that the Alice-in-Wonderland
dimension of
Donald in Mathmagic Land, in both its film and comic-book
incarnations, coincided remarkably well with the philosophy behind a relatively
new extra filmic development in the Disney universe: Disneyland. The Magic
Kingdom had opened in Anaheim only four years before the film’s debut,
and Disney himself saw a distinct parallel between the theme park and the narrative formula that he and his studio had worked with for so many years. “Disneyland is like Alice stepping through the Looking Glass,” he said simply, adding
that “to step through the portals of Disneyland will be like entering another
world.” From Disney’s perspective, it made sense to encourage audiences to
think of the learning process as an adventure that would take them through an
unfamiliar land full of marvels. Just as Donald, who initially looks as if he is
in the midst of an Adventureland safari, is whisked away to ancient Greece to
learn about Pythagoras, pentagrams, and the relationship of mathematics to
music, so too would Magic Kingdom visitors be transported to the theme
park’s various lands and learn from their exhibits and installations.
At least,
that was the way Disney claimed to have originally envisioned Disneyland: as
an educational venue. It is a place, he said, “for people to find happiness and
knowledge” and “for teachers and pupils to discover greater ways of under
standing and education.” Noting further that Disneyland will offer “the wonders of Nature and Man for all to see and understand,” Disney observed that his
theme park “will remind us and show us how to make these wonders part of
our own lives.” The perspectives that governed Donald in Mathmagic Land
hardly differed (121-22)". It is this realization that there is something that makes the simple acquisition of knowledge more palpable, with a greater capability for sticking in the mind, that allowed Walt to enjoy the kind of outside of the box style of thinking that would allow him to connect the dots between a thinker like Pythagoras, and a children's author like Lewis Carroll, and then find all the best possible ways of combining the two into the kind of package that somehow proves to be a fascinating combination of the educational and the entertaining. It's perhaps the closest Walt ever came to realizing Sir Philip Sidney's dictum that the end of Art is to "Entertain and Delight". At any rate, this is certainly the reaction that I can say I had watching this.
Donald in Mathmagic Land proves to be one of those interesting childhood memories where you come away with two unique yet related takeaways, depending on which age that you watch it. Like, I must have bought my first Disney Mini Classic vhs edition way back when I was the nine. I have a clear memory of watching this cartoon at the dusty old house were my grandparents used to live, and my initial response was that I liked it well enough, though it's like I got the sense that there might be something else going on here, and I could never quite put my finger on what that was. Having had multiple chances to come back and rewatch it as a so-called adult, it turns into one of those films that rewards you for growing up and paying attention. In other words, the more learning you have under the hood, the better this film gets with age. Norden and Riper aren't lying when they claim that Walt believed that sometimes the best stories are the ones with a good narrative hook to them. In this regard, it really does look like Disney took a leaf from Carroll's book in figuring out how to make one of the dullest subjects on Earth into something very like an exciting adventure. If I had to cite the major difference between a film like Mathmagic Land and any of the Alice stories, it's that I don't think Carroll ever set out to write any coded lecture on Mathematics when he sent his protagonist down the rabbit hole. I think that images such as the one just described came to him, and all his did was follow after.
In other words, I think it's a mistake to claim that the makers of
Alice in Wonderland, or even
Fantasia are operating with an explicit desire to send some kind of message to their readers or viewers. If I had to list a number of reasons why that should be the case, then it boils down to just two. The first is that both the writer and the film producer shared the same belief in Romanticism. What that meant in practice is that they often seem to have felt that the best way to tell any story is to get out of the Imagination's way, and let it do its own thing. I'd argue this is the standard operating procedure that Carroll followed as he chronicled Alice's exploits underground or through the looking glass. Everything I've read or heard about Walt tells me he and the Nine Old Men followed pretty much the same technique when it came to putting films like
Snow White together for the first time. It's what makes a film like
Mathmagic something of an outlier to Walt's usual routine. As it's one of the few times when the audience finds itself confronted with the artist crafting a work toward a deliberate purpose. This is what brings me to the second maxim with regard to how Carroll and Disney usually ran their artistic affairs. The long and short is that experience has taught me that it's often a bad idea to start out with a message that you want to lecture others on, and then try to see if you can build up a narrative around it. It's even worse when you have an idea worth defending, and then shoot yourself in the foot over it.
Seeing what the inheritors of Walt's company have done with his life's work, I think most will tend to agree with that. If it's at all possible for any story to carry some kind of thematic idea somewhere within itself, then it tends to work best when its treated as just another gear or cog in the overall picture, rather than an end in itself. Whatever socio-cultural critique might be buried amidst the forest in which Hansel and Gretel get lost in, it still doesn't change the fundamental fact of the text we've got in front of us. This is the story of what happens when two little children are left alone, and stumble upon a witch. That's the main point. Everything else is secondary. It's because this seems to have been the two main strictures that Walt followed with the vast majority of films and cartoons he produced which makes the success of a film like
Mathmagic such a fascinating specimen to study. Here we've got a picture that really does amount to a classroom lecture on celluloid. Everything I've learned from every other specimen of this kind tells us there's no way you're going to make something like this a fun ride. And so I come away with the same familiar sense of Enchantment that Walt was capable of in his best efforts.
It begs the question of how that's even possible? The best guess I can offer on that score is to conclude that what saved things is that Walt must have gotten fascinated by all of the more fanciful elements that used to get attached to Pythagoras's philosophy. I don't see the point of claiming him as some sort of sorcerer of numbers, like some people do. Nor do I believe for a minute that Walt was ever gullible enough to fall for such historical fallacies. At the same time, it is true that this is just one of many such myths that somehow managed to accumulate around the philosopher's legacy as the years went on. It did get the point, in fact, where actual folk tales about the ancient mathematician would crop up every now then. For instance, there was the claim that he once discovered the language of animals, and was therefore able to hold forth in serious discourse with sheep, goats, and horses in a humble stable, like a Greco-Roman Dr. Dolittle of sorts. I've even stumbled upon one short narration where he's even allowed to save the populous of Samos from an actual dragon, if you can believe it. I'm not even sure if that's taken from an ancient source or is a total modern invention. However, it is worth citing as a useful enough example of the folklore that later generations would allow to accumulate around the name of Pythagoras. Even Plato's Socrates ever got as much good publicity as that. We're talking about one of the few scholarly thinkers who somehow managed to enter into the realm of Fantasy fiction.
It might just be possible that Walt ran into stories like the one of about talking animals and the dragon mentioned above. If so, either image counts as one that could have found a home in his usual repertoire. I would have even understood if Disney was tempted to try and turn one of these Pythagorean fables into an animated cartoon, in the same vein as he did once with "Johnny Appleseed". It's to his credit that Walt decided to never go there, however. The subject of
Mathmagic Land is one firmly rooted in real life. However, it does seem as if the mythical folklore of Pythagoreanism funneled through the phantasmagoria of Lewis Carroll is what Walt latched onto as the key piece of Imaginative illustration he needed in order to make an otherwise dull and dry subject come to the kind of Enchanted frame of life that he specialized in. Perhaps the most remarkable result of Disney applying his usual form of animated fantasy tropes to the subject of this film is that neither one clashes with and thus diminishes the other. The science of math is treated with the respect it deserves, and yet in doing so Walt and his team are able to find room to infuse their usual brand of Inspired animation so that while the subject remains grounded, it never once feels as if we're being lectured to. Instead, it's more in the way of how the film is presented. We trail along after Donald as he makes his way through a fantastical landscape made up of numbers and equations which act as if they all came from Carroll's Wonderland.
This approach is what allows Walt to treat the material as an entertaining journey, rather than a dull academic slog. It's what allows Donald to interact with the denizens of Carroll's Looking Glass chess game, while also teaching the young viewers the ways in which the world's most famous board game is based around a literal number of calculated precisions. It's a heck of a lot more entertaining than, say, watching Donald get challenged to a match with an annoying super computer that then proceeds to mop the floor with the poor, dumb sap's lack of skill as a player. It seems to be this ability to find the actual potential of mathematics as a genuine form of entertainment that allows
Mathmagic Land to succeed without selling its soul for a plotful of message. It's this discovery which makes the film into a success across generations, yet there's nothing unique about Walt's exposure to this idea. There are enough historical examples left lying around to demonstrate that people have been realizing the artistic potential of numbers for ages. According to Oxford Professor of English, Alastair Fowler, a personage such as
Edmund Spenser was able to apply the logic of Pythagoreanism to his work in The Faerie Queene. While Maren Rostvig claims that
John Milton inherited this same strategy from Spenser just a few short years later. Christopher Butler has built on the findings of Fowler and Rostvig to demonstrate how
numerous authors have been able to rely on and utilize the potential of numbers in writing fiction.
It's also not a dead subject, by any means. As recently as 2023, Professor of Mathematics at Birkbeck College, Sara Hart, has written
a book that details all the ways in which various literary greats have come to depend upon the aesthetics of numbers in order to get their dramatic point across. Eric Bulson, meanwhile, has argued as late as the year 2021 that none other than
James Joyce availed himself of Pythagorean techniques in the composition of Ulysses. All of these differing strands from various critics go together to paint a very intriguing picture of how one single thinker from the Classical era can go on to have an outsized impact on several generations of artists. It might be possible that this same process is what kick started here when Walt decided to put a focus on Math as the subject for a kid's documentary. He knew the final product would have to be a compromise combination, of sorts. It couldn't sacrifice so much as one shred of scientific veracity, on the one hand. On the other, Walt was stuck with the question of how to make the otherwise tedious act of doing sums look entertaining. Much like with Spenser or James Joyce, Disney seems to have found a very helpful ally in Pythagoreanism. It's what allows
Mathmagic Land to transcend its both its subject and its time period.
What I mean is that this is one of those documentaries that has a surprising amount of staying power to it. A good way to gauge how well this effort has been able to hold on, it might help to compare its shelf life with that of a similar themed program. This would be the aforementioned Our Friend the Atom. That's an interesting episode of Disney's Wonderful World to go back and look at with contemporary lenses. Walt was able to succeed by and large in creating films with a timeless quality to them. Yet this particular episode is one that dates itself real fast on several levels. You can tell that what you're looking at is little more than the Cold War propaganda piece it was meant to be when it first aired. The real punchline here is that the Atom episode was first broadcast back in January of 1957, just two years before Walt released the story of Donald in the Land of Numbers. The two are so much night and day that it's a wonder there was such a short window of time before each of their respective debuts. This can also be seen in the way each offering handles its material. Atom lays out its subject matter in a way that comes off as much more in the typical, straightforward documentary approach, wheres Donald's feature is structured and executed like a genuine Fantasy adventure. There's a lot more of the standard dry recitation of facts as they were laid out in the 1950s paradigm of the time, when the full measure of Einstein's Quantum Mechanics was still filtering its way into widespread awareness despite being accepted as verifiable fact by the scientific establishment of the era.
It means viewers get treated to a showcase of how people understood atomic energy back in your grandparents' heydays. The Atom episode does still contain a certain amount of interest, yet it's largely of the type reserved for a curio, or museum piece. Our understanding of technology has advanced far far past the paradigm that Walt had to work with in that episode that the very idea of relying on atomic power to generate most of our daily life is almost laughable in a thoroughgoing digital age. It's all of these outmoded elements that gives Our Friend the Atom a vibe that stands as more or less the polar opposite to Mathmagic Land. In contrast, Donald's foray into the world of calculus has managed to retain this sense of fascination that it's carried around ever since its initial theatrical release. A lot of the reason for that is because while there have been challenges to the Pythagorean paradigm, unlike the atomic one, it has still managed to hold its own, even as the world transitioned away from the analog civilization that birthed it. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that Pythagoras's theorems still have a place for themselves in an era where number crunching has become on of the crucial tasks in keeping such economic necessities like bandwidth, pixelation, and Wi-Fi on a proper working basis. There's a long-term practicality to Mathematics that's lacking in a mere atomic element of nature.
The best news of all is that this practicality does nothing to lessen the sense of entertainment that one can get from a short film like this. I've said that perhaps the key ingredient that makes this picture work is Walt's realization that he had to tell the intertwined facts of science and history in the same way that he would a story. That observation seems to remain true enough. What I'll swear I can never quite put my finger on is just
how he was able to make that work, even in what is supposed to be a documentary. The best I can say is that Disney has this talent for being a natural entertainer, and in his best work, it climbs out of the screen and carves a memory in your mind, the kind you can't seem to not care about, for some reason. A lot of it has to do with Walt's ability for sharing his enthusiasm for Fairy Tales, and stories about Fantasy and enchantment. There's an enlivening quality to narratives like this that Disney was good at capturing on film, despite what any of the shrinking circle of critics may say. I guess the real achievement of this simple numbers documentary is that it showcases Walt's ability to to apply the same thing to real world topics. That he can, for lack of a better word, find the Enchantment in the everyday. It's for all these reasons that I say
Donald in Mathmagic Land is worth checking out.
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