Articles on Animation 12 Aug 2009 07:40 am

Wartoons

Der Spiegel, in their current issue, has an article about the use of Disney (and U.S. animation in general) for propaganda during World War II. This is an interesting article and I’m not sure why they chose to publish it. They’ve also included a gallery of 17 good stills of frame grabs and posters from the material.

I wish that the article were a bit more of a commentary from the German viewpoint. I’d like to hear their opinion of some of this obviously biased material. There were also some well chronicled animated propaganda that came from the German side.


Two stills from Trnka’s The Springman and the SS
This film includes the horrific image of 2 GAY Nazis !

The DVD Cartoons for Victory! (from Thunderbean Animation) includes a number of these films from both sides. There are a number of Private Snafu shorts, Jiri Trnka’s The Springman and the SS, Hans Fischerkosen’s Der Schneeman and Nimbus Libere (another Nazi propaganda short).

Thanks to Kathy Ryan for pointing me in the right direction for the Der Spiegel article.

Much more has been written about this subject at David Lesjack‘s excellent blog, Toons at War blog. This is a site I’d encourage you to view often. Material like the image below are frequently featured there.

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Congratulations to those New Yorkers who got films in competition in the upcoming Ottawa Animation Festival. They include:

    Fran & Will Krause
    Jake Armstrong
    Jennifer Oxley
    Mike & Tim Rauch
    Signe Bauman

4 Responses to “Wartoons”

  1. on 12 Aug 2009 at 1:02 pm 1.Charles K, said …

    The gallery is really interesting and definitely well worth a look, although I got a bit of a shock when the newspaper article on ‘The Ducktators’ popped up. It dawned on me that I had the short on VHS when I was a kid back home in Ireland where I watched it for years and only now has it dawned on me that it was a propaganda film!

  2. on 12 Aug 2009 at 6:47 pm 2.Richard O'Connor said …

    I realize you didn’t intend to list all New York animators. Martha Colburn, although cited as Dutch works out of the city as well.

  3. on 13 Aug 2009 at 1:38 am 3.Niffiwan said …

    How timely! :)

    I had just recently written about the films that were made in the Soviet Union during WW2 (including links to subtitled videos):

    http://niffiwan.livejournal.com/20674.html

  4. on 13 Aug 2009 at 7:47 am 4.Michael said …

    Niffiwan, your post is incredible. I have a lot of video to look at. Many thanks.

    i encourage others to visit this site to see some amazing Soviet animation.

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