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 second of a three part series.
Anti-Nazi Germany propaganda was created to clearly delineate the enemy. Much of these parody the leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler, in the many satirical incarnations of him in animation film.
Der Fuhrer’s Face (1942) propaganda film starring Donald Duck aimed at a younger audience, but was also encouragement for Americans to buy war bonds. I posit that it took inspiration from two of cinema mogul Charlie Chaplin’s films: Modern Times (1936) portrays Chaplin’s Tramp character in an unforgiving industrial production factory, and Donald Duck undergoes a similar sequence of struggling to keep pace with a relentless assembly line. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) is a dedicated satire of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.
Blitz Wolf (1942) directed by Tex Avery, made for MGM. It uses Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs as an analog for guarding against the looming threat of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany’s expansion.
It is interesting to compare the different humor and narrative structures used in Der Fuhrer’s Face and Blitz Wolf, though both were released in the same year for the same cause. They are perhaps characterized by each different studio’s approach to animation. Der Fuhrer uses the same eponymous song, which follows Disney’s vision for music and sound being a driving element of animation. Blitz Wolf is noticeably more slapstick, and uses gags with extreme cartoon physics, as well as more innuendo jokes such as a released German bomb pausing to read the page of an Esquire magazine. Notably, Der Fuhrer won Bliz Wolf at the Academy awards.
Disney’s short film Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi (1943) is, in comparison a much darker and more somber, yet more nuanced view of Nazi Germany. The film shows the gradual indoctrination of Hans, a young German boy growing up under the rule of the Nazi party, who is brainwashed in cheering for Hitler (who is, for good measure, satirized as a barmy knight) and becoming a soldier, and presumably ‘cannon-fodder’, to die a horrible death.
Reason and Emotion (1943), also produced by Disney, draws the analogy of reason and emotion being two entities inside each person’s mind (perhaps a precursor concept to the 2015 film Inside Out, but I digress), in order to illustrate what the film calls the ‘Nazi German brain’ where emotion has been manipulated by Hitler to take the helm. It also encourages the audience not to be victims of fear-mongering. Although a somewhat outdated portrayal of how the human mind works, it is a valiant attempt at making American audiences understand why Hitler’s doctrine is so affective in Germany.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 