Despite — or perhaps because — wartime being a time of tension and uncertainty, the American animation industry consolidated its forces towards the Second World War effort. Animation was used as a medium to portray war, to instruct, and to disseminate messages. This is the first part of a three-part series.
Although Peace on Earth (1939) was not a film made for the war effort, it was released two months after WWII started in Europe, and its portrayal of war I find interesting and important enough to include as a forward to animations that are more strictly propaganda in nature.
It is an anti-war, pacifist film produced by by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer company. It was presumably made during the collapse of international relations between the Allied and Axis Powers in the late 30’s, but definitely before the United States joined WWII.
Peace takes place in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic earth, where humans have wiped each other out while waging war, and woodland animals have taken over and are now re-telling the stories of humans’ wars. The film seems to be cautioning against war with the hindsight of WWI, which was the largest scale war known to humankind at its end in 1918, and was even then called ‘the war to end all wars’. It certainly depicts war as brutal: the battlefield sequences are very realistic and well made, in stark contrast to the joyful cartoon animals.
Interestingly this film was remade after WWII with a different scenario, and even more brutal war scenes showing more technically advanced weapons than Peace on Earth, in light of the many innovations in weaponry in the actual war, including the nuclear bomb.
The rest of the series will dive into the many types of animation made during the war effort.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 