Understanding: Animation and Politics

Political animation is very well not a new concept, nor is it the most welcomed concept in film either. Political campaigning can be considered dangerous as the audience of it is most likely going to have a large fraction of children who cannot be stopped in watching these films. This is mainly down to the freedom of the internet. For animation culture, the internet has let to the possibility for any animation with any political message to be shared, watched and go viral, and it is dangerous because these political messages are not always good.

There is a branch of political messages that can be considered dangerous and this can range from, propaganda, to war, sexism, environmentalism to even socialism. The list goes on and it is a sensitive subject for many people and some are more reactive to it than others.

I think a very memorable political time for animation culture, was during World War II, when Disney had to consecutively produce propaganda films for the public, making Germany look very, very bad. I remember being shown one of these films quite a few years ago in my History class in high school and couldn't believe Disney were even capable of making such films.

                    

This is the exact one which I had seen and even I knew it was propaganda before I even learnt what propaganda really meant. 'Der Fuehrer's Face' involves Disney's famous Donald Duck being recruited to be a soldier for Hitler and following his rules. The whole piece depicts Hitler as the enemy, something America was desperate to get across. Donald Duck has to hide his possessions, be forced out of bed, eat nothing but bread and water and march all day as his job. Though Hitler really was a bad person, this animation by Disney just goes to show how much they can actually enforce on to children, how far they can go to get their political campaigns across. This is the dangerous element, because children are in no place to have such strict independent views at their age.

                     

On the other hand however, America weren't the only ones producing animated propaganda. Taking Japan for example, they went to the extent of making animated full feature length films, some going up to 70 minutes long! They also made short films involving an evil Mickey Mouse who attacked Japan and took everything they had. Though this wasn't WWII, it was actually for WWI, perhaps this is where Disney got their influence from, either way at the time Mickey Mouse was the 'it' animated character, so for children to see these films obviously turned them off Disney and the USA.

In conclusion these are just two incidents that display propaganda, but display it in the sense of how influential it was and how dangerous it was. The messages were far from subliminal because they knew what they were doing, and are extremely immoral. And I don't think Disney would be caught dead creating something like this, today!