Donald's Nephews is a 1938 Donald Duck animated cartoon which features Donald being visited by his three nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. This cartoon is Huey, Dewey, and Louie's first appearance in animation. Al Taliaferro, the artist for the Silly Symphony comic strip, proposed the idea for the film, so that the studio would have duck counterparts to Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse, the nephews of Mickey Mouse. The Walt Disney Productions Story Dept. on February 5, 1937, sent Taliaferro a memo recognizing him as the source of the idea for the planned short.

The memo indicated, “we have decided to actually put a story crew to work on Donald’s Nephews.” With the short already in production more than eight months before the boys' Donald Duck comic strip debut (on October 17, 1937), the animation studio's model sheet and storyline would have been Taliaferro and writer Ted Osborne's frame of reference for the comic strip. Because the strip was an adaptation of the animated shorts, it could utilize ideas from films still in production (DuckTales reversed this, being a TV adaptation of the comics). Similarly, Barks' Junior Woodchuck prototype, Good Scouts, was released three months after identical scouting uniforms were introduced by Taliaferro and Bob Karp in the comic strip.

The nephews being triplets who finished each others' sentences was developed by Carl Barks, the screenwriter/storyboard artist of the film, for whom Happy Hooligan, a comic strip that featured such triplets, was a childhood influence. This characteristic appeared for the first time at the end of the film. The nephews' names were devised by Disney gag man Dana Coty, who took them from Huey Long, Thomas Dewey, and Louis Schmitt, a Disney Studio animator.