Horizon

Walt at War

By far the most interesting selection in the Walt Disney Treasures DVD series has just been released - On the Front Lines, a compilation of the studio's wartime output, which includes cartoons starring Donald Duck & co., government information films, training shorts, and other animated ephemera produced by the Disney company from 1941-1945. It seems that Walt Disney took a keen personal interest in his company's wartime contributions, regardless of profit; indeed, the Disney firm almost went bankrupt producing unnecessarily elaborate and often quite beautiful films that would never make back a fraction of their cost. There are two particularly striking cartoons, Der Fueher's Face (a fantasy tale in which Donald imagines himself a serf in a Nazi-dominated country; the visuals are straight out of Modern Times and Spike Jones provides the amusing titular score) and Education for Death (a scary animated 'documentary' about a doe-eyed innocent becoming a fanatical stormtrooper under Nazi tutelage; think Bambi with the SS thrown in).

Some general observations:

As you might expect, the portrayal of the Japanese (and, to a lesser extent, the Germans and Italians) would not past muster with the racially sensitive these days, although the enemy are more often depicted as comic buffoons than as bestial apes or some of the other unpleasant excesses of wartime propaganda.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis is alluded to, though always indirectly - there's much made of 'Aryan supremacy', while 'forbidden names' like Sarah and Rebecca are mentioned, as is the burning of a Mendelssohn suite - but I don't think the word 'Jew' is ever used in any of these scenes. Perhaps Disney believed (accurately, I suspect) that 1940s audiences would be less sympathetic to a specifically Jewish plight than they would to a more generalized theme of racial victimization.

The centerpiece of the collection is Victory Through Air Power (1943), an hour-long mixture of live action and animation which is an adaptation of a book by Major Alexander de Seversky. This, along with the still-embargoed Song of the South, was the only full-length Disney cartoon that had never been available for purchase, though unlike the controversial Brer Rabbit movie it was probably just the period obscurity of Victory that delayed its release. It's a detailed and often dazzling production, with splendid animation and high production values, although the themes it propagates (America must build 3,000-mile range bombers to attack Japan from Alaska, among other things) were pretty eccentric even at the time. It's a shame that Disney didn't go the whole hog and add a commentary track by an aviation historian; that would have turned an interesting historical curio into a really significant work of scholarship.

Posted by Alan Allport at June 25, 2004 09:29 AM