There’s something a little bit ridiculous about Grand Opera anyway, but give the conductor’s baton to Mickey Mouse and make Clara Cluck and Donald Duck the stars of the show—as they are in Mickey’s Grand Opera—and you know this most highbrow of art forms is about to get a good-natured skewering—Disney style. Listening to Clara’s piercing clucks and Donald’s unintelligible garbling during their duet is the comic highpoint in a short full of them. And when a mischievous Pluto, at first engaged in dubious battle backstage with a magic hat, eventually finds his way onstage and adds his plaintive howl to the final throes of Clara’s and Donald’s off-key finale, the short ends on a perfect note. Mickey’s Grand Opera was directed by Wilfred Jackson, who was one of those inventive and industrious men Walt specialized in hiring. In his long Disney career, Jackson, who worked as a sequence director on 11 features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Lady and the Tramp, also invented the bar sheet to coordinate animation action with the soundtrack. Jackson retired from Disney in 1961, and was honored as a Disney Legend posthumously in 1998.
