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DVD-Day for Disney's WWII films
By Thomas K. Arnold, Special for USA TODAY
Hollywood is still abuzz over the Walt Disney Co.'s refusal to let its Miramax division distribute director Michael Moore's new documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which is critical of President Bush.
But Disney hasn't always shied away from politics — a point driven home with Tuesday's DVD release of Walt Disney On the Front Lines, an elaborate package of propaganda and other war-related films that includes Der Fuehrer's Face, an animated short that not only poked fun at Adolph Hitler but also portrays Germans and Japanese in an unflattering light.
"There was some feeling that some of this material shouldn't be put out there, that some of the cartoons could be viewed as insensitive and even insulting," concedes Dave Bossert, one of the producers. "But the way we were able to do it was to couch it in a historical context so everyone who watches it really understands what was happening in the world when these films were made."
In Der Fuehrer's Face, which won the 1942 Academy Award for best short subject, Donald Duck wakes up in "Nutziland," where even windmills, trees and fences are shaped like swastikas. Ordinary Germans are depicted as harsh, militaristic stooges, while Japanese are characterized as grinning fools.
"We brought in some German nationals I know, as well as some Japanese, and I think everybody who looked at it said it's a piece of history, something that happened 60 years ago," Bossert says.
The two-disc set, part of the Walt Disney Treasures line, also includes recently declassified training and educational films; cartoons designed to help the war effort such as The New Spirit, in which Donald Duck shows why Americans should pay their taxes; a series of lighthearted war-themed shorts, including Private Pluto; and the full-length feature Victory Through Air Power, about the importance of aerial bombing.
The 32 films in Walt Disney On the Front Lines were produced during the early war years, when Disney became part of the war effort.
Film critic Leonard Maltin, who hosts the Treasures line, considers this set one of the most significant he has done.
"Most of these films are unlike anything the studio, or almost anyone else, had done," Maltin says. "They had a real seriousness of purpose — in some cases, propaganda; in some, morale-building; in some cases, very specific technical directions. And all of this had to be accomplished by a team of animators and story men and artists who were used to animating ducks and mice."
One of the Disney animators who worked on the propaganda films is Joe Grant, now 96 years old and still a member of the team at Walt Disney Feature Animation. Before he was pulled into Disney's war effort, Grant was best known as the designer of the witch and queen characters in 1937's landmark Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and co-writer of Dumbo.
When the federal Office of War Information, Department of the Treasury and other agencies came calling in the wake of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Walt Disney was quick to offer his help. And for the next two years, his studio churned out hundreds of hours of material.
Grant and his frequent collaborator, the late ________ Huemer, contributed stories, gags and designs for many of the Disney war shorts, including Der Fuehrer's Face, Reason and Emotion and what many consider the most serious short the Disney studio ever created, Education for Death, which shows a boy growing up in Nazi Germany humiliated for having feelings of warmth and compassion and ultimately marching, and dying, with his fellow brainwashed soldiers.
Der Fuehrer's Face was inspired by the Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator, Grant says. "It was just plain, blatant criticism," he says, borrowing from both the Chaplin film's assembly line sequence as well as previous British attempts to ridicule the rigid marching of Hitler's troops.
Any idea what Hitler thought of the Disney spoofs?
"I came across a reference once that Hermann Goering had given Hitler some Disney animated shorts, because Hitler was a fan," producer Bossert says. "Hitler had expressed his belief that Germans could do as good animation as Disney was doing, and they produced some propaganda cartoons themselves."
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