MTA 101 ("Film in America")

Instructor: Walter Metz

Animation in World War II and Post-war American Cinema

In today’s lecture, I’d like to produce an ideological reading of the cartoons produced by the Hollywood studios. I choose two case studies during the World War II context (studio animated shorts and Disney animated feature films) in order to "make strange" or defamiliarize you from seeing cartoons as ideology-free, childish entertainment.

Animation in film studies, was, up until a few years ago, virtually ignored. It would typically not even rate a mention in a traditional film history text, and, if mentioned, would feature animation’s technological aspects, or offer a great man history of Walt Disney. Studying studio animation is absolutely pivotal, because it is virtually the last extant remnant of the studio system’s mixture of features and shorts to offer a whole night’s program of entertainment. Going to the studios’ theatres for a Classical Hollywood audience meant seeing newsreels, travelogues, live-action shorts, animated shorts, and then usually two features (a lesser "B" picture and then the main "A" feature). Whereas newsreels, travelogues, and live-action shorts from the Classical Hollywood era are hard to find today (except on nostalgia channels like AMC and TCM), Hollywood cartoons became part of our cultural consciousness when, in the early 1960s, they were packaged together into children’s shows for TV. This is why, in all probability, we know so much about Warner Bros. cartoons and so little about so many other Classical Hollywood texts.

However, the fact that these cartoons appear on TV children’s shows makes us lose sight of their original cultural functions as adult entertainment, to be seen at movie theatres. Studio cartoons such as the ones made at Warner Bros. tend to: 1) refer to other adult texts, typically other studio films (Warner Bros. cartoons often parody Warner Bros. actors like Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis) and 2) deal with mature subject matter (Warner Bros. cartoons use the same offensive stereotypes as other live-action films of the period).

CLIP: Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs (Warner Bros., Robert Clampett, 1943)

Ideology, however, needs to be understood within an analysis sensitive to a specific historical context. That is, it is not enough to say that the cartoons were racist as an ahistorical analysis, but to instead try to specify the strategies of representation that cartoons used at each historical moment. This is why I’ve chosen to study cartoons produced during World War II. Studio animated shorts, like all other kinds of Hollywood films, were retrofitted for the war effort.

CLIP: Popeye the Sailor ("Seein’ Red--White and Blue", Paramount, 1943): ending

The film starts with the traditional plot line of a Popeye cartoon: Popeye the protagonist fights with Bluto the antagonist. Here, Bluto gets drafted and is trying to find a way out of the navy, while Popeye, the navy draft officer, is trying to force him to sign the draft papers. At the second turning point, Bluto tries to hit himself on the head with a safe so that he can be declared 4F. However, Popeye saves him. Bluto gets mad, and throws Popeye and the safe across town. Popeye ends up crashing into an orphanage which is in fact a front for Japanese spies (masquerading as infants!). Since Popeye is too dumb to figure this out, the Japanese soldiers begin beating on him. Bluto, coming to gloat over his declared 4F status, sees Popeye’s predicament and gets mad. Popeye eats some spinach, gives some to Bluto, and the two of them defeat the Japanese soldiers. Thus, the traditional plot of a Popeye cartoon is retrofitted to a war-time context in which Popeye and Bluto join forces to defeat the enemy. This is incredibly significant, it seems to me, since it demonstrates how easily the narrative structure of a Popeye cartoon (i.e., Bluto is always the antagonist) can be overwritten by war-time ideology.

Warner Bros. animated shorts were also retrofitted to grapple with the war

CLIP:  Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (Warner Bros., Friz Freleng, 1944): beginning

This cartoon was directed by Friz Freleng, a German expatriate, yet he does not use his real name on the credits. Instead, he is credited as I. Freleng. This is because, no doubt, Fritz was the stereotype name for any German during WWII. This points to a fear of a common kind of American simplicity: that anyone German must be an enemy. This reductionistic attitude makes it easy to fight a war, but does not accurately describe the diversity of attitudes German-Americans must have held during the war. Ironically enough, the cartoon itself reduces Japanese ethnicity to just as bald a stereotype.

In addition to the racist, anti-Japanese attitude that the cartoon uses, Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips uses the strategies of self-reflexivity discussed by Dana Polan in his essay. Self-reflexivity means a text which self-consciously refers to its own strategies of textuality. The most self-reflexive strategy in cinema is the representation of cinema itself. When the camera turns back on itself (through a mirror, for example) and shows itself, this is a self-reflexive moment.

There are two self-reflexive moments in Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips

  1. Bugs Bunny "looks" into the camera and says, "Eh... Just killing time ‘til the island that inevitably turns up in this kinda picture inevitably turns up." This is self-reflexive because a character within a narrative knows more than he should: he knows what is supposed to happen in the narrative about to unfold. Through Bugy Bunny, the text is referring to its own means of narrative construction.
  2. The Japanese soldier knows who Bugs Bunny is because he has seen Warner Bros. cartoons, similar to the one he is a character in at this very moment. This is self-reflexive because again, the character knows not only about his narrative universe, but that this narrative universe is a fictional one being watched by "real" spectators (such as himself). Again, the text, through the soldier, produces an awareness of its own fictional status.

In the mid-1970s, many film critics were attempting to define a counter-cinema which would argue for progressive political change, in contrast to Hollywood cinema, whose function is to support the status quo. Such critics very often produced a formalism which argued that modernist film style automatically meant political progressivity. In his essay, Dana Polan argues against such formalist critics, claiming that just because a film uses self-reflexive strategies, it is not necessarily "progressive." Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips is a perfect example to support Polan’s thesis: the cartoon uses modernist, self-reflexive techniques, but is as racist a text as one could imagine.

The most famous example of Warner Bros.’s cartoons’ self-reflexivity, and the one that Dana Polan refers to in his essay, is Duck Amuck. A close study of Duck Amuck also reveals the limitations of a purely formalist definition of a modernist counter-cinema.

CLIP: Duck Amuck (Warner Bros., Chuck Jones, 1951): ending

The cartoon is clearly self-reflexive: the backdrop threatens to collapse on Daffy, Daffy delivers lines directly into the camera as he speaks directly to the animator, two Daffy Ducks each from a different frame of film begin arguing with one another, etc. The film even activates intertextual referencing to other modernist cinema: as Daffy is hammering away at the anvil, the background is right out of German expressionist culture. Compare this moment to the one in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, one of the masterpieces of German Expressionism.

CLIP: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919): Monster flees the townspeople

However, Duck Amuck ends up by backing away from what might make this a truly radical investigation of the animator’s power over a diegetic character. The unseen antagonist animator turns out to be merely Bugs Bunny. Thus, the end of the film moves us back into the standard diegetic conflict of a Warner Bros. cartoon: Bugs vs. Daffy.

Walt Disney Animated Feature Films

The other way that we could track the war-time context of American film animation is by turning to the most famous of American film animators: Walt Disney. Something that may surprise you is my argument that Disney is one of the more politically conservative of the great auteurs of Classical Hollywood Cinema. Recall that the German post-war German emigrees to the United States like Theodor Adorno went so far as to fear Disney culture as producing a climate for fascism in America! I will certainly not go this far, but do want to express worry about the dangers of the so-called "Disneyification" of American culture.

The clearest example, for me, of the dangers of Disneyification is a few years back when the Disney Corp. wanted to build a theme park in Virginia teaching kids about American history. The critics, myself included, were in an uproar because of how Disney culture reduces historically complicated issues to a happy little story ("It’s a Small World After All," for example). Would American slavery be presented through the eyes of the Uncle Tom character prominent in Song o the South. Would the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki be presented as a ride similar to "The Pirates of the Carribean?"

Such political conservativeness is clearly present in Disney’s World War II animated features themselves. The clearest example of this can be seen by comparing two very similar scenes featuring the destruction of the bourgeois home in Pinocchio (Walt Disney, 1944) and Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, 1961).

CLIP: Pinocchio (Walt Disney, 1944): Pleasure Island sequence

In Pinocchio, the destruction of bourgeois culture is seen as an evil act. In the Pleasure Island sequence, a "Model Home" is destroyed by the kids. However, the film makes them pay for this by turning them into donkeys to be sold to the salt mines. Thus, the destruction of middle-class values is punishable by death in Disney’s version.

CLIP: Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, 1961): Parody of "The Last Supper"

In Bunuel’s version of the destruction of the middle-class home, the destructors are celebrated. The modernist, anti-Catholic Bunuel revels in the proletariat’s deriving pleasure from the destruction of the landlord’s home. What is otherwise a space for repression and hypocrisy becomes now a site for eating and sexual pleasure. No such punishment of the destroyers as is seen in Pinocchio is present in Bunuel’s version.

But, what does all this have to do with the World War II context? First of all, during World War II, Disney used the most cruel methods possible for breaking a strike by union workers at his studio. Thus, a company with an image of being an icon of American greatness turns out to practice the most un-American labor practices imaginable.

Secondly, while Pinocchio and other Disney features were extremely successful in the United States, World War II threatened to cripple the studio. This was because the animated films, immensely expensive to produce, relied heavily on international markets to make a profit. Because Disney Studios did not have distribution or exhibition holdings (Disney distributed his films through RKO), their sole outlet for profit lay in production. So, the foreign markets were doubly important to Disney. Disney’s decision to pursue FDR’s "Good Neighbor Policy" is usually presented in patriotic terms. The Good Neighbor Policy was President Roosevelt’s 1940 idea to encourage good relations between the United States and Latin America (to keep the countries from becoming Fascist, and later Communist, enclaves). Disney participated in the Good Will Policy by taking a trip to South America at the request of Roosevelt. However, the economic straits of the Disney studios reveals this decision as not nearly so altruistic as it may at first appear to be. Disney’s films were immensely popular in Latin America. As the European and Asian markets had been completely decimated by the war, the Latin American markets were virtually the only remaining stable international markets for Disney to exploit. As a result, under the rubric of the Good Neighbor Policy, Disney decided to make two films about Latin America to appeal to one of the few economic markets still open to his films. The films that resulted were: Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1945). The Three Caballeros mixes live action travel footage with cartoons of Donald Duck visiting his "friends" in South America: Jose Carioca (a Brazilian) and Panchito (a Mexican).

Despite the purported intentions of the film, it replicates American cultural imperialism with respect to the Third World. America’s relationship to the Third World in general (and Latin America in particular) in the 20th Century can be characterized by attempts to control the region for economic and militarily strategic reasons. Especially during the Cold War, but even before, as the case of the Good Neighbor Policy during World War II attests, the Third World was split into ideological battle grounds. During this period, American intervention into the affairs of the Third World intensified. These interventions were both covert (the CIA’s illegal toppling of governments) and overt (the Good Neighbor Policy). Cultural imperialism refers to these overt ways in which American culture attempts to manipulate the affairs of the Third World through the exportation of cultural artifacts, such as The Three Caballeros.

Two examples of Cultural Imperialism in The Three Caballeros

1. Assumed Geographic Superiority

CLIP: The Three Caballeros (Walt Disney, 1945): The world upside down

Here, through geography, the dominance of the United States is maintained. Despite the fact that the Earth exists in empty space, we think of the United States as being on top of Latin America. This historical trend is continued through the joke seen here.

2.  The Third World as America's Resort

CLIP: The Three Caballeros: Donald Duck strafes the sun-bathing South American women

The lecherous male behavior of the ugly American is sanctioned here by using the popular Donald Duck. Despite the film’s disturbing use of the strafing-run military metaphor for sexuality, this moment is meant to be taken as funny.

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman