The Wise Little Hen

"The Wise Little Hen" will be of eternally significance to film history for one very simple reason: it's the cartoon that introduced Donald Duck. That's pretty much the only reason though. "Wise Little Hen" is never terrible, but there's nothing really remarkable or lasting about its storyline or images.

A matronly and sweet little hen and her chicks are going about planting, harvesting and cooking with her crop of corn. Along the way she asks Donald Duck and Peter Pig who continually feeds her stories about having tummy aches despite constantly being found dancing, singing and having a good time and abruptly stopping the moment she asks them for help. That is, until she asks them to help her eat the fruits of her labor. Her final trick on them is very clever and well-deserved, pretending to give them a basket full of corn bread and it turning out be a vial of castor oil instead. And that's probably the funniest bit in the entire cartoon. It's not much of an entry in the Silly Symphonies canon apart from the first appearance of Donald Duck.