A somewhat surprising image, I’m sure you’ll agree. A duck drinking coffee?
The Disney propaganda cartoon DER FUEHRER’S FACE, with its insistent Spike Jones score, is one of the more startling cultural emanations from the American war effort. Donald (above) plays a sort of Good Soldier Schweik of the Third Reich, persecuted on all sides by his Nazi superiors. It’s interesting that the film’s argument against Hitler is basically that Germans are less well-off, in terms of finances and access to consumer goods, than their American counterparts, an argument that would be quickly adapted to fit the Soviet Union once the war was over (see NINOTCHKA for a particularly entertaining example of this) and has been trotted out again to explain the motivations of Al-Qaida (see Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics response to 9:11).
Disney was always the most conservative animation studio politically, even if they were radical artistically: when Leni Riefenstahl visited Hollywood before the war, no studio head would meet with her… except Disney. Of course, most of the other guys were of Eastern European Jewish origins, whereas Disney was of German WASP descent, but still… the guy should’ve paid attention more, one feels.
Tex Avery’s BLITZ WOLF, on the other hand, is devoid of any ideology — the Hitlerian wolf is simply the baddie. This is undoubtedly the most entertaining of the anti-Nazi cartoons, due to Avery’s robust rejection of politics in favour of visual anarchy, with Hitler as the victim. Chuck Jones, who was admittedly a confirmed professional and personal confabulator, claims that when MGM toon boss Fred Quimby looked over Avery’s shoulder to see what he was drawing, he quailed: “I don’t think you should be quite so nasty to Mr. Hitler: after all, we don’t know who’s going to win this war.”
In this week’s edition of The Forgotten, over at The Daily Notebook, I examine the work of Robert Clampett and his Hitler smackdown GREMLIN FROM THE KREMLIN.
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