Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959) on Netflix
Approved195927mAnimationFamily
Donald Duck carries a hunting rifle through a doorway and lands in Mathmagic Land, where trees bear square roots and a stream runs with numbers. An unseen voice offers to guide him.
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- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.8/102,690 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
Donald Duck steps through a doorway with a hunting rifle and enters Mathmagic Land, a fantasy land where trees bear square roots, a stream flows with numbers, a walking pencil plays tic-tac-toe, and a geometric bird recites the first fifteen digits of pi. The unseen True Spirit of Adventure offers to serve as his guide. Donald wants no part of it, dismissing mathematics as a subject for eggheads, until the Spirit mentions a connection between math and music. That leads Donald to learn how octaves and the length of a string produce the musical scale. He next appears in ancient Greece, where Pythagoras and two musicians perform a jam session and Donald joins in, drumming on a vase.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The short was made available to schools and became one of the most popular educational films Disney ever made; Walt Disney said cartoons were a good medium to stimulate interest and that explaining mathematics this way excited public interest in the subject.
- In the 2023 Ted Lasso episode "Sunflowers", the character Lasso hallucinates about the geometry of triangles, and the animated sequence is visually similar to Donald in Mathmagic Land, with Lasso hearing The True Spirit of Adventure voiced by Corey Burton.
- The Disney short appeared in the opening sequence of the Futurama episode "The Numberland Gap", and it also inspired the main plot of that episode.
