Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Killer Toons

Been sick the past two days. Still feel shitty, so I thought I'd share some interesting shorts.

Here are a series of Soviet anti-Nazi cartoons from 1941. Pretty self-explanatory. Note the Hollywood influence on the Russian animation. No surprise, given Stalin's love of American film.



I don't know what this is, apart from being a pro-Nazi cartoon (the anti-Jewish caricature a giveaway). Popeye, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck appear as American pilots ready to bomb France. One YouTube commenter suggests that this was made by French Nazi collaborators, aimed at those French who looked to the US for liberation. Who knows. Still, a strange little short.

A READER WRITES: "This cartoon was made in Vichy France sometime in 1942-43. It satirizes listening to Free French shortwave broadcasts from London, and it also takes jabs at US cartoon culture by having the B-17 bombers manned by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer cartoon characters. At the time the cartoon was made, the US Army Air Force was bombing U-boat pens in Occupied France and hitting industrial targets in Vichy and Western Germany, so the audience is not only supposed to loathe the vacilating French family listening to broadcast, but also the bombers and their crews."



Here's another cartoon featuring a warmongering Mickey Mouse. Made in Japan, 1936. Clearly, the Japanese were not pleased with US complaints about their imperialist expansion in Asia. So they took it out on Disney's rodent.