| Up a Tree | |
| Director: | Jack Hannah |
| Producer: | Walt Disney |
| Story: | Dick Kinney Milt Schaffer |
| Music: | Oliver Wallace |
| Animator: | Bob Carlson Al Coe Volus Jones Bill Justice Dan MacManus (effects) |
| Layout Artist: | Yale Gracey |
| Background Artist: | Claude Coats |
| Studio: | Walt Disney Productions |
| Distributor: | RKO Radio Pictures |
| Released: | (USA)[1] |
| Color Process: | Technicolor |
| Runtime: | 6:30 |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
Up a Tree is a 1955 animated short film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures.[2] The film stars Donald Duck and Chip 'n' Dale, with Donald trying to top a tree in which Chip and Dale are living. It was directed by Jack Hannah and features original music by Oliver Wallace.
Donald Duck is a lumberjack who sets out to top a tall tree on a hill. The tree happens to be the home of chipmunks Chip 'n' Dale, who do whatever it takes to protect it. Chip starts by unhooking the harness holding Donald to the tree, causing him to fall. Confused, Donald scales the tree again to resume his work, but Chip uses a stick to push the harness cord into the path of Donald's saw. Although a hanging branch breaks his fall, Dale drops an acorn on Donald's head to continue his plummet to the ground.
Determined to complete his job, Donald climbs back up the tree with a heavy chain wrapped around his waist. This time he succeeds in topping the tree, but due to the chipmunks pushing up the chain, he ends up falling back to the ground with top of the tree he cut landing on top of him soon after.
After he gets out from under the topped tree, Donald discovers the chipmunks mocking his plight and he once again scales the tree to saw it down, intending to get revenge on Chip and Dale. Donald fails yet again, resorting to violently chopping the tree down with an axe. Despite Chip and Dale's efforts, the tree falls and flips on its ends until it lands on a log flume.
Using a pike pole, Donald mounts the log and heads for the sawmill. Chip and Dale catch a ride in a toolbox on a zip line overhead. They ride ahead of Donald, jump from the tool box with a hammer, and dismantle a side of the flume with it. The log goes off the flume and toward a shed, with Donald trying to outrun it in his car and then, thanks again to Chip and Dale, on foot when the log crushes the vehicle. Finally, the log heads into a mine shaft and emerges on the other side with a box of dynamite atop it. Donald frantically reaches home and moves everything out of the log's way as it enters and flies through the house.
The log emerges without damaging anything, to Donald's relief, but it gets caught in the power lines behind the house and is about to be catapulted back toward him. While Dale knocks on the door moments later to point this out to Donald, Chip climbs the log and moves the dynamite nearer to the house. Donald futilely tries to push his house away and the log destroys it upon impact. As Donald looks at his ruined home in stunned grief, Chip and Dale both laugh hysterically at his misfortune as the cartoon ends.
In The Disney Films, Leonard Maltin described Up a Tree as one of the "funniest and fastest Donald Duck cartoons... a later effort that has one of the most frenzied string of gags ever concocted for a Disney cartoon."[3]
The short was released on November 11, 2008 on Walt Disney Treasures: The Chronological Donald, Volume Four: 1951-1961.[4]
Additional releases include:
The short was included in House of Mouse episode "Chip 'n' Dale".