Donald in Mathmagic Land
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Donald in the land of math magic |
| Original title | Donald in Mathmagic Land |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1959 |
| length | 27 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Hamilton Luske , overall direction Wolfgang Reitherman , Les Clark , Joshua Meador sequences |
| script |
Milt Banta , Bill Berg , Heinz Haber |
| production | Walt Disney |
| music | Buddy Baker |
| camera | Edward Colman |
| cut | Lloyd L. Richardson |
| occupation | |
| |
Donald in Mathmagic country (German DVD titles Donald in the land of MatheMagics ) is an American documentary - short film by Hamilton Luske from 1959. The for an Oscar nominee from Walt Disney -produced film was a respected in the 1960s Educational film in American schools.
Donald Duck goes on an adventure in the land of mathematics and shows with examples how useful mathematics can be in life. On his journey, he demonstrates that numbers and geometric shapes can be more than graphics and diagrams; besides geometry, they are magical beings that can lead us to music and many other topics.
Closing words: “Only with our mind can we grasp the infinite. Mathematical thinking has opened the door to the exciting adventures of science. Every discovery leads to many others. It's an endless chain. Of course, many doors are still closed, because these are the doors that lead into the future. The key to them is ... the math. Immeasurable treasures of science still lie behind closed doors. The thirst for knowledge and curiosity of future generations will open them up in due course. "
content
Equipped with a shotgun and a safari hat, Donald Duck goes on a trip into the wilderness. There are numbers on the ground there, trees literally have square roots, and a strange bird-like creature cites Pi, with a mistake creeping into the sequence. Donald makes a phone call in an unfamiliar voice, telling him he hated math. The distant voice leads Donald to ancient Greece and tells him about Pythagoras , who was a particularly clever mind and father of mathematics. Donald now encounters mathematics in a place where he doesn't even expect it. The voice presents him with a taut rope that he should pluck, which results in different tones depending on the application. Pythagoras discovered that the octave has a ratio of 2: 1. He found this out with simple fractions and it was on this harmony expressed in numbers that our scale developed. Pythagoras and his friends, the Pythagoreans, had a secret symbol, the pentagram . With their mathematical formulas they would have created the basis for our music today.
And again it was our old friend Pythagoras who discovered the mathematics contained in the pentagram. The two shorter lines together would result in exactly the line of the third and this in turn shows the magical proportions of the famous golden ratio . The second and third lines would result in exactly the fourth and again we would have the golden ratio. But that is only the beginning, because there is another secret in the pentagram: the so-called Golden Rectangle, which the British admired for its magnificent proportions and magical properties. The star contains many golden rectangles. It is a very remarkable shape that mathematically can continue to infinity. All of these rectangles would have exactly the same proportions. Each figure contains a magical spiral that repeats the proportions of the golden ratio to infinity, known as the Fibonacci sequence . For the Greeks, the golden rectangle was a mathematical law of beauty, which is reflected in their classical culture. The Parthenon Temple, perhaps one of the most famous buildings of early Greek times, contains many golden rectangles. We would find the same golden proportions in the sculptures of the Greeks. In the centuries that followed, the golden rectangle had a dominant influence on the ideal of beauty in the entire western world. The Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral is an excellent example. The painters of the Renaissance would have known this secret too, and even today, in our modern world, we would find the golden rectangle everywhere. Modern painters would have rediscovered the magic of these proportions, and even in life itself we would find these ideal dimensions.
And in nature, on the other hand, we would find the pentagon many times over, for example in the flower of a petunia , star jasmine , starfish and wax flower . In nature there are indeed thousands of distinguished members of the Pythagorean star society. All values of nature would contain a mathematical logic and their patterns would be unlimited.
It is then pointed out that the magical dimensions of the golden ratio can often be found in the spirals that nature has formed. With the abundance of mathematical formulas, one has to think of the words of Pythagoras: “Everything is ordered according to the number and the mathematical form.” That is true, we find mathematics in music, art and everything in general. And the rules are always the same.
Mathematics is also in the game, for example in the game of chess , which is a mathematical competition between two brains. Lewis Carroll , a mathematician, but best known as a writer, turned chess pieces into characters in his story about Alice behind the mirrors . Chess is a game based on a carefully thought-out strategy on a geometric board. Therefore, the trains are to be calculated mathematically. Almost all games were played on geometric squares, so the baseball game was a rhombus , and without math we couldn't even count the points. The American football game takes place on a rectangle that is divided into yard lines, in German meter lines. Basketball is a game in circles , curves and rectangles . Now the narrator turns to billiards , a game in a rectangle with three balls that should also touch the boards. You have to know exactly at which angle you have to hit the ball. Billiards have a lot to do with mathematics, since the player has to work out exactly which move he is playing.
But the most exciting playing field is in the brain . In Donald's brain everything tumbled upside down, in order to be able to think properly, a major cleaning had to be organized first. The new game has to do with circles and triangles . Donald should imagine a perfectly round circle. He should put a triangle in there. And then turn this and then turn the circle, what does he get then, yes a ball . Let the form of all things arise first in the spirit. If you cut off a piece at the top, you have a magnifying glass . The lens is part of the sphere; we owe all optical instruments to mathematics. So there is much more to it than just numbers and equations. Now back to the circles and triangles. If you roll both, you have a wheel . The circle was already the basis for many important human inventions. The brain can create the most amazing things. If we rotated the triangle, we would have a cone. If you cut it up, you can see that it contains a lot of useful mathematical formulas. If you cut it again and many more times, you will find the orbits of all planets and their satellites in the cone . No matter how you cut it, it's always math. A piece like the one shown gives us the reflector of a spotlight , and let this piece be the mirror of a giant telescope . A wire wound in the shape of a cone makes a drill ... and a spring ... and now it is ticking ... the phone rings, a record spins, there is drumming . The brain is the birthplace of all human scientific knowledge, it can do anything when it is used correctly. Think of a pentagram and put another in it, then a third and a fourth. Even the sharpest pencil cannot draw as finely as a person can think. And all the paper in the world is not enough to reproduce the human imagination. The film ends with a quote from Galileo Galilei : "Mathematics is the alphabet with which God wrote the universe."
production
Production notes
It is a Walt Disney Productions production distributed by Buena Vista Film Distribution Company. In addition to Hamilton Luske, who was responsible for the overall management, Wolfgang Reitherman, Les Clark and Joshua Meador were responsible for the individual film sequences. The team also included Disney artists John Hench and Art Riley as well as the language talent Paul Frees and the scientific expert Heinz Haber, who had already worked on the Disney space shows.
Stan Jolley was responsible for the artistic design of the scenes. Vincent McEveety was on the directing team, Robert O. Cook oversaw the sound, Eustace Lycett and Jack Boyd provided the visual effects.
publication
The film was first released in the United States on June 26, 1959. It was released in Brazil in September 1959, in France and the United Kingdom in November 1959. The film was first available in Ireland in 1960, as well as in Canada, Australia and Japan. The film was also released in Argentina, Croatia, Finland, Italy, the Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay and Venezuela. In Germany it was published on DVD under the title Donald in the Land of Mathemagie as part of the Magic Fairy Tale World Part 3 series.
Two years after its release, the film became part of Disney's anthology series The Wonderful World of Color , where it aired as the first color episode on September 24, 1961. The universal scholar Ludwig Von Drake , a new Disney character, put Donald in Mathmagic country before.
reception
criticism
On the SDB-Film page, Sidney Schering stated that as the commercial suitability of regular cartoons and its artists deteriorated, Walt Disney would have paid more attention to the segment of entertaining educational films. One of these educational productions was extremely popular, Donald in Mathmagic Land . This was the first of this new series of educational films, a film that Walt Disney personally paid particular attention to. Contrary to the advice of his brother Roy, he made sure that the film got to the cinema. The chess game between two hostile parties, the general framework of the film about a character from the normal world who stumbles into a land of bizarre things and also the design of the math-magical wonder world are reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland . All in all, the result is that Donald appears exciting and entertaining in Mathmagic Land instead of selling himself as a brittle lesson right from the start.
Award
Academy Awards 1960 : Walt Disney was nominated for an Oscar in the category “Best Documentary Short” , which however went to the Dutch film Glass by Bert Haanstra , which focuses on the work of a glassblower .
Further use
In 1959 a comic book adaptation was published, which was drawn by Tony Strobl based on a script by Don R. Christensen and inked by Steve Steere . The comic book adaptation differs in a few ways from the original story of the cartoon version.
In the animated series Mickey's Clubhouse , the episode Gone Goofy contains an advertisement for Mathmagic Land .
Web links
- Donald in Mathmagic country in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Documentary Short Film Review: Donald in Mathmagic Land see page everymoviehasalesson.com (English)
- Donald in Mathmagic Land Fig. DVD case in the IMDb
- Donald Duck in the land of math magic (part 1) see German film version on dailymotion
- Donald Duck in the land of math magic (part 2) see German film version at dailymotion
Individual evidence
- ↑ Walt Disney - Magical Fairy Tale World Part 3 Fig. DVD case, Studio Walt Disney
- ↑ The Chronological Donald Volume 4 DVD Review see page dvdizzy.com (English).
- ↑ Sidney Schering: Donald in Mathmagic Land see page sdb-film.de. Retrieved January 23, 2020.
- ↑ The 32nd Academy Awards | 1960 see page oscars.org (English).
