The Bombingest Place on Earth

It remains one of my favorite college lectures: during a film-history course at Orange Coast College during the late 1990s, professor Steven Valley shared his Kafka-esque ordeal in trying to view propaganda films the Walt Disney Studios produced during World War II. Phone calls to various Disney historians went unanswered, Valley recounted; written requests never reached their destination; visits by Valley to Disney's Burbank archives resulted in trips from one office to another, all to no avail. After months of fruitless inquiry, Disney brass finally relented. They shoved Valley into an unlit basement room, carted in a TV/VCR set, popped in a videocassette containing the desired cartoons, and left him for about three hours. No notes were allowed. No recorders. No questions. Upon the tape's completion, security guards escorted Valley out and told him never to ask for a second screening since it wouldn't happen.

"They were," Valley said, "the greatest things I'd ever seen in my life"—well-animated, hilarious and highly effective in their brainwashing efforts. But Valley also understood why Disney shrouded them in secrecy. Like all Hollywood studios during World War II, Disney turned over its facilities to the Pentagon and produced pro-war films preaching sacrifice and Jap-bashing. But Walt Disney devoted his company to the cause with an intensity unmatched by any other mogul. Unlike the animation departments at Warner Bros. and MGM, Disney's cartoons openly called for annihilation rather than mere light-hearted mayhem, placed its characters on the front lines instead of metaphorical battlegrounds, and accomplished it in a way so beloved by the Armed Forces that, according to Thomas Doherty's 1993 book, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II, "Sandbags and anti-aircraft guns surrounded the only Hollywood studio designated as a 'key war-production plant' and 'essential industry.'"

After the war's conclusion, Disney pulled his animated arsenal from circulation, trying to erase their ruthlessness from the historical memory. The films quickly became cult classics, discussed in hushed, aching tones on the scale of the Holy Grail or the Amber Room. Access to them was so limited that even a group of animation scholars was barred from using stills from Disney's 1943 Oscar-winning short Der Fuehrer's Face when they placed it at No. 21 on The 50 Greatest Cartoons, a 1994 collection of essays. Disney's reason, according to the book? "Donald [Duck] appears in a Nazi uniform."

Last month, however, Disney quietly released its World War II library in Walt Disney on the Front Lines: The War Years, a superb two-disc collection of cartoons, educational shorts and interviews with artists. Valley was right: the films in the collection are fantastic, witty, racist and frightening, some of the finest cartoons released by Disney, if not by any studio, ever.

What prompted their release? And what lessons can modern-day Americans discern from 60-year-old propaganda cartoons as the country once again finds itself asked by the government to sacrifice and buckle down in the face of terror?

Most purchasers will understandably focus on the more verboten aspects of the 29 shorts that constitute the first disc, those films that employ gross caricatures of Germans and Japanese. None do so more viciously than the aforementioned Der Fuehrer's Face (which imagines Donald Duck as a swastika-bedecked Nazi manufacturing munitions while heiling Hitler about every other second) and the somber Education for Death (the biography of a blond German boy who devolves from wide-eyed innocent to Hitler Youth to a graveyard). In both films, Japanese are portrayed as green-skinned fops and Germans function as little better than human bulldogs. As offensive as those images are, excellent production quality ultimately redeems them from being mere artifacts—in particular, you'll be humming the Der Fuehrer's Face theme song for the rest of the afternoon.

These films demonized the enemy in a way that would've made Hitler jealous. But even more telling about Disney's ideological intentions was a six-segment series starring Donald Duck produced between 1943 and 1944 and included in On the Front Lines. In the inaugural Donald Gets Drafted, the quacker marches to the draft office, notice in hand, and ready for duty. Subsequent episodes involve Donald AWOL, unable to set up a pup tent, and painting a supergun invisible, much to the consternation of his commanding officer, Peg Leg Pete.

And Disney didn't try to idealize military life in his Donald Duck series. "All we do is march and march and march!" Donald quacks at one point. But if a duck could join the army, Disney argued in these movies, then so can you. And that incessant marching can ultimately lead to heroism. In Commando Duck (1944), the series' final installment, Donald receives orders to destroy a Japanese airfield. Although still a bumbling conscript (he can't even jump out of a plane properly), Donald does succeed in his mission. This being Donald, it's done in a wholly coincidental manner—the raft he used to sail down a river fills with so much water that its subsequent rupture causes a massive tsunami. The wave's aftermath is horrendous: Japanese planes hang from trees and telephone poles in a scene that eerily recalls a lynching. Instead of solemn silence, though, the wah-wah of a trumpet blurts, and Donald chuckles over a job well-done. "Enemy Washed Out," Donald writes in his log as he dangles from a tree.