Donald in Mathmagic Land

Summary

This Oscar-nominated featurette is a typically felicitous Disney combination of music and live action. In search of big game, hunter Donald Duck stumbles into a strange and wonderous land dominated by numbers: numbers on the ground, numbers in the trees, numbers in the river, even numbered footprints left behind by a walking pencil. The offscreen voice of The Spirit of Adventure informs Donald that he is in Mathmagic Land, immediately dispelling the duck's dismissive attitude that mathematics is "egghead stuff" by immediately highlighting the correlation between math and music. We then travel back in time to Pythagoras, who uses mathematical equations to produce the most beautiful of music. He also disovers the "mathmagic" in the pentagram and the golden rectangle, which can mathematically reproduce itself indefinitely, and is also the foundation of all architecture and scupture. Much to Donald's fascination, he learns that mathematics can even apply to the shapes of nature, from a starfish to a tree, and to such common everyday game as chess, baseball, football, basketball and billiards. Finally, there's the most exciting "game" of all: the shape of things that are discovered and formulated in the human mind. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi