Animation: Love, Hate and War

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, just what the hell is this guy talking about. Well it's a bit of a long story to explain this thesis statement, I have had a love of Animation, (I'll just call them cartoons for now on) for nearly twenty years and that is why I go to the School of Visual Arts and I'm majoring in my third year of it now. Entering this school I was offered a class called the History of Animation, it expanded my own knowledge of Animation and widened my horizons of its uses. Growing up I had just saw it as a comedic art form, relying on the slapstick of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as two comedic partners reminiscent of Laurel & Hardy, Martin & Lewis and Abbot & Costello. But now I'm aware of what cartoons were used for in it's over a century life span; Comedy, Love and Adventure as just a few examples. But one question plagued my mind, does Animation only go as far as entertainment, or does it have a much more psychological response to it's audience on the aspect of what it wants and gets out of the social life of Americans. I have seen it before in the past and I feel a second rise is coming for our times.

Near the beginning of the 1940's, the Walt Disney studio was going through some hard times. His first five major features weren't doing so well overseas, all because of one man's hold over there- Adolf Hitler. The war split Europe in turmoil and any sort of free will or love were stomped underneath leather Gestapo boots and the Third Reich's iron clad fist of control over the countries. Walt slumped into despair, his features had to temporarily stop after Bambi, so he relied much more on his shorts department which mostly ran before cinematic features at the time. As the World War II rolled on, it became every American's right to chip in during wartime whether it was conserving meat, saving lard or even have their sugar and butter rationed to them. And even Walt helped contribute, well whether he liked it or not at least.

Sergeants, Captains and Admirals amongst just a few of the government's finest, poured into Walt's studio giving him ideas of how he should start releasing some films. It became his job as a citizen to produce animated films that exploited the Axis powers of the time. Government officials would come in to the studio with scripts and story boards they came up with themselves and they even practically tried to be directors of the shorts, completely overseeing Disney's every move. More and more power was taken away from Disney, and it was all getting dumped into the hands of the government. Films such as "Der Fuehrer's Face" (1943 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short); "Education For Death"; "Fall Out-Fall In"; and "Commando Duck" amongst a few titles were shown as propaganda in the American audiences. Exploiting the evil deeds of the Nazis and the Japanese was an easy task for the Disney animators. In "Der Fuehrer's Face", Donald Duck has a dream he lives in Nazi- Germany and works in a bomb factory. His job is to screw all the caps onto the missiles and the whole time and clock at work is watching over him making sure he screws as many on a possible and giving honor towards Hitler with a "Sieg Heil". In my humble opinion this is probably one of the funniest shorts I've seen from the Disney studio since I normally hate all of their cutesy garbage, but nothing beats watching Donald praising Hitler really, really fast.

So Walt was quite upset, all of his creations were being taken away from him and used to exploit his enemy's deeds. His films were also used as recruitment options of getting people into the Armed Forces. It was like watching a cartoon version of Uncle Sam and the youth of that time knew it was the best thing to follow their cartoon heroes into "V"ictory. And so, after the Great War, Disney went back to his love stories, and features and his so-called Renaissance style of Animation. He did his job for the country and was glad to be out of the business of exploitation. But what had happened at Walt's studio wasn't the only place that the U.S. government had an influence over the masses through animated manipulation, they struck numerous studios.

To start things off, things were the same at my favorite "Golden Age of Animation" studio, the Warner Bros. Things were not as amuck at the Termite Terrace in sweet Sunset Boulevard, California lot as they were the rivals of the Disney studios. Directors like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Fritz Freleng all enjoyed the tales that the government gave them, even though most of them were their own wacky ideas. Disney was handed things to work on, and he had really no say about it, the government took over his studio. But the boys at the Warner Bros. lot had absolutely no problem whatsoever, some of their stories of exploitation, drafting and plain out just speaking to the public of what they should do during wartime were basically their original scripts that officials enjoyed.

The army allowed the cartoonists wide latitude. As Jones describes it, "Storyboards had to be approved by the Pentagon, but it was fairly loose and we did throw in a lot of business. (Schoenherr)

Anyone who would have been able to see this motley crew of "Looney Tunes" had no objections of making fun of war time enemies using cream pies, seltzer bottles and any other forms of all out pure slapstick. Even down to the banana peel gag....

The Warner's had excelled in many forms of comedy in the past but now they were brought into a challenge of exploiting real people, dictators, murders; and getting paid a fat seventy-dollars a week. They were astounding and their comedic styling completely surpassed that of Disney and could have only been rivaled by the MGM cartoons. The Warner's had to offer, "The Ducktator", "Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs", "Tokio Jokio" and "Daffy the Commando" (One of the Looney Tunes first shorts filmed in color).

Subtlety was never the aim of these endeavors: In "Bugs Bunny

Nips The Nips, the rabbit sells Japanese soldiers on a Pacific island

Good Rumor ice cream bars with hand grenades hidden inside,

snapping as he doles out the desserts, "Here y'are, Slant Eyes."

-(Maltin)

The films had some tactics of racism that is a reason today they will not be shown on television unless your lucky around 2 AM on a Sunday morning. Which was where I was lucky enough for the first time to see a great WB World War II short called "Russian Rhapsody" by Bob Clampett. This film shows gremlins from Russia who were heard of ripping apart plains flying around their motherland. Well a funny characterature of Hitler plans a trip to Russia just to prove to his men that he's not afraid of any little gremlins and they are nothing but chunks of imagination. ""Yeahhhhh, could be"", was what Mel Blanc said in the voice of all the "Gremlins from the Kremlin" amongst many other Warner Brothers characters over the years. They attack and tantalize Adolf's trip sticking nails up his ass, hitting him with wrenches and hammers along with other tactics of ""physical and mental anguish all in the tone of "Orchechornya".""(Matlin)

Oh but there is more, much more gags upon gags of Warner Brothers intestinal fortitude. All types of war slogans and practices found their ways into the Warner cartoons. In "Brother Brat", Porky Pig has to baby-sit this little bastard child with an almost schizophrenic personality (he even turns into Franklin D. Roosevelt at one point) when his mom has to go off to work at an ammunitions plant. And in "Super Rabbit", "it ends with Bugs Bunny announcing, ""This looks like a job for a real Superman"- a U.S. Marine."" (Maltin)

But probably one of the greatest of these wartime reels was Bob Clampett's "Draftee Daffy", where Daffy Duck has to avoid this tiny little solemn guy trying to deliver his drafting notice. And no matter where exactly Daffy turns (in a MGM Droopy fashion), the little draft board guy is always right there. Daffy even hops on a rocket that states "in case of induction only" and it goes straight through the floor into the fiery pits of Hell, but again to no avail the man is always waiting.

My particular love of the Warner Bros. cartoons, and much close to their cartoon cousins the MGM cartoons was the amount of historical knowledge that sticks with these little features. I can remember watching these little shorts on television when I was a little kid asking my parents and grandparents "Daddy why do they have to turn all the lights out, what's a "A" card, what's Meatless Tuesday, and what are meat points. All of these little vocabulary words that are great elements of the past and live on for generation upon generation, as long as cartoons live so will history. Which is just another aspect of this paper I had wanted to discuss was how Animation is not just entertainment; it's history. These cartoons have merely effected generations upon generations and have expanded our minds with knowledge via the lesson of humor.

Now that I've mentioned Disney and the Warner Bros. lots and give little mention of MGM, I can tell you they definitely are last but not least. MGM was full of some great wacky gags just like Warner Bros. but they also had a little less character development, less directors but dazzling and unique music and sound effects that brought true life to the shorts. Yet again I may mention that MGM had their period of films on the war front, their two primary directors were Hanna-Barbera whom exclusively did the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons and Tex Avery, who had recently left Warner Bros. to go on his exclusive directorial fame setting standards in Animation such as in Tex's first MGM short "Blitz Wolf".

Tex loved to make fun of Disney and everything he stood for, in particular his cutesy little wood animals. So in that case, he took the standard of Disney's "Three Little Pigs" and he spoofed it a bit calling it "Blitz Wolf" (1942 Academy Award Winner for Best Animated Short). So now this wolf has this little Hitler moustache and driving around in a tank blowing up the houses of these three little G.I.'s. He also made a short that dealt with all the food shortages at the time and the extreme rationings. In "What's Buzzin' Buzzard", these two vultures are so starved they are reluctant enough to eat one another in a quite grotesque fashion. And in the film they are looking through a cookbook and a picture of a juicy steak with some fried onions appears on the screen accompanied with some patriotic Star Spangled Banner music and it's supposed to make the crowd wild and starved. And at the very end of the cartoon, you hear a voice over and a man says ""In compliance with so many requests from the audience we're going to show the steak again"", and the photo returns and fade to black. Yet again another source of not only how Tex directly interacted with the audience but how his actions are felt for years to come.

Tex had a lot of elements of hunger and eating in his films and sometimes they were the pure basis of the short. Influenced by the wartime rationings again for example the classic cat chasing the canary. Not only did Tex had the present times influence him in his work, but he had uplifted and brought the G.I.'s overseas in an uproar from a little short called "Red Hot Riding Hood". In the first of the Red series, this one features the girl dancing on stage, but as a special present to the soldiers, she takes it ALL off. Tex was also a master of using provocative sexual situations in his time and was one of the earliest forms of people actually expressing eroticism in that medium. But talking about Tex's use of erotic work is getting off the subject of how these studios and directors made war time efforts more lenient on American audiences in such time of dread, violence and fear. But again it was able to show how Animation was able to go a little bit further than the eyes of children.

In 1942, Col. Frank Capra was put in charge of the Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit. He was told to come up with an idea for informational entertainment films to be shown to all branches of the Armed Services. Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss), was placed in charge of the animation branch. Capra created the idea of a character called "Private Snafu" (Toon Zone)

SNAFU, which was an

obscene acronym that spread rapidly among enlistees: "s(ituation) n(ormal), a(ll) f(ucked)--u(p),". Private Snafu regularly "fucked up" in outlandish ways that connected with soldiers and taught military lessons. (Schoenherr)

Snafu was a regular part of the "Army Navy Screen Magazine", a bi-weekley newsreel made exclusively for the armed forces audiences. Twenty-eight SNAFU shorts were created and the episodes' work loads were split up amongst the top studios of the time: (Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, Hugh Harman etc.)

The Snafu cartoons are B&W and average about 5 minutes each. Since they were made for an audience of servicemen, there is much more sex and foul language than in a regular cartoon of this time (though nothing worse than "hell" or "damn" is spoken). These cartoons are not only interesting historically, but they're also very funny. Each WB director was in top-form when they worked on this series. There is no shortage of Japanese and German stereotypes, since making fun of our enemies is an American tradition to this day (i.e. Saddam Hussein in the "South Park" Movie). (Toon Zone)

Ok so there is all of my supporting information on what this medium is liked and how it assisted millions during the fourties. Whether it helped them sign up for the forces, illustrated how to save and conserve, or forget about such genocide of cultures and dump their emotions more into laughing about the enemy's folies in a delightful short. Or perhaps you could look on this subject with a different perspective and how it lead to the social obstructivness of Asian Americans during that time. How they too were sent to United States based concentration camps. War is hell and sometimes not even the greatest amount of humor can change the darkest evils. I feel comedy could be used as a form of revenge along with it's thousands of other uses. And all of the people that worked on everything I have mentioned all contributed to their nation's efforts. I merely wrote this paper since I know so much about comedy and in particular, a huge amount of history of Animation based up in my skull. My views may not be clear but I know for one thing how all of these animated shorts have effected their original audience and taught them exploitation and other things the government needed at the time. Or how it trickled down into my generation by teaching us historical facts and wanting to learn the truth about the past.

So with what happened in the past with shorts is it bound to happen once again with our newfound enemies of terrorists and such? I had recently read in a New York Times article where a critic was doing a review on Arnold Schwarzenegger's new film of Collateral Damage. He stated the film really mirrored our current situation of the Tali-ban of terrorists blowing up buildings. More and more films in the months and even years to come will be focused on making the United States being the bigger bully and eventually defeating a enemy country. That is there are so many World War II films coming out, Americans want to have a fuller sense of pride and machismo to watch other Americans defeat the enemy. The current times we live in mirror the society of Film and Television just like "Alice" looking through the looking glass in another world.

So will that mean the same will even trickle down to the fledgling world of Animation? You bet it will, why even in the 80's with Reagenomics, the animation studio known as Sunbow released a film called Transformers: The Movie. It also mirrored the world we live in at the time depicting robots as the citizens but this film fit right in with the corporate conglomerate world of the 80's only caring about pumping out as many new characters as possible and killing off the old ones. And even today I have seen the beginning of exploitation on Osama Bin-Laden with cartoons on a little show called "South Park". The episode features the four boys going to war with the Tali-ban while Eric Cartmen is on a hunt to destroy Bin-Laden. Reminiscent of 40's war time animation, Cartmen and Bin-Laden go through a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd hunting routine, kisses on the lips, anvils, bombs and even corny music. In the end Bin-Laden not only has the smallest penis in the world that not even a magnifying glass can pick up, but also he is blown up and then shot in the head. Is this only the beginning to other expressions of exploitation, well I guess we'll have to see how long this terrorist situation holds up.

And so in conclusion let me just recap this paper for my audience that I hope didn't get lost in my rantings of useless knowledge. I did this paper due to my extensive knowledge of cartoons and thus I knew how they affected American society during wartime using their exploits, drafting and illustrating what they should be doing to help keep the country going. I think many of these shorts helped the society of that time in many ways and its rippling effect is felt through younger viewers of today of it's historical values. This art form along with other facets of television and film represent our innermost desires and our dreams of escaping into fantasy to just forget for one moment all of the terrible messes in the world and laugh it right off. I only hope my audience understood also how I feel about all this great work over the years because I know once I graduate, I'll be right out there to start up a brand new batch of comedy.