From the eggs Mother Duck is lovingly sitting on hatch lots of nice ducklings, but one of them is ugly. All the others sneer at and snub him, and he is forced to go away so that the others won’t be mean to him. But one day he comes across a group of marvellous swans and they don’t snub him: the ugly duckling discovers that he too has become a beautiful swan.
The moral is clear: we all tend to snub and sneer at whoever is different from us, but those who are different possess worth that should be respected.
This cartoon, the last in the Silly series, won an Oscar for best animated short. The music is by Albert Hay Malotte. Disney had created an earlier black and white version in 1931.
