World War Cute

Abstract

Propaganda animation is something of a limit case when it comes to audience reception. Propaganda is the point where “just cartoons” become calculated bids to spur people into direct action. But just how much did the film fans of the 1940s really believe or obey the exhortations of the silver screen? Many animated attempts to sway audiences’ minds through awe or mockery seem excessively blatant in their patriotic appeals. When Disney’s Donald Duck wakes from a surreal nightmare of living in Nazi Germany to proclaim, “Am I ever glad to be a citizen of the United States of America!” (“Der Führer’s Face,” 1943), his unadulterated jingoism inevitably provokes groans and laughter among film students today. Seo Mitsuyo’s “Momotarō’s Sea Eagles” (1943), which uses the folkloric figure of Momotarō the Peach Boy and his cadre of adorable animal sidekicks to reenact the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a kind of slapstick comedy, warrants a similarly detached—if slightly more uncomfortable—amusement. Because these films are so earnest and yet so over-the-top in their patriotism, they can take on a campy or melodramatic quality to today’s animation fans. But in their own time, they were thought by studio heads and governments alike to have a powerful appeal. Where animated shorts of the 1920s and 1930s tried to build global harmony through representations of fan audiences and star characters, propaganda films aimed to construct national audiences through direct address, speaking to as well as speaking about their viewers. In propaganda, reflexivity becomes most clearly creative, since what is shown on celluloid, however fantastic, refers to and influences the “real world” behaviors of viewers during wartime.