In the early 1940s, as the flames of World War II steadily engulfed the globe, the United States war machine ramped up in response, producing an unprecedented quantity of heavy weaponry through rapid industrialization and a cooperative all-hands-on-deck approach. In Hollywood, the massive studio mechanism was also compelled to do its part, the perceived frivolousness of the film industry making it all the more necessary for those who’d enjoyed its spoils to wholeheartedly pitch in. As actors led charitable bond drives, executives issued high-flown statements of solidarity and directors waded directly into battle, displaying their clench-jawed virility through gritty battlefield documentaries, cartoon characters also took up the cause. Usually taking the form of shorts sandwiched between newsreels and main features, these works offered satirical jabs at the nation’s enemies, instructive courses in preparation and defense, and all manners of other responses to the largest external threat in the nation’s history.
The key detail here was that cartoons suddenly weren’t such light fare; the war helped to legitimize animation, turning a medium formerly considered childish into a potentially useful propaganda device. This forced audiences to take it seriously, and while it’s hard to gauge exactly how crowds reacted, studios recognized the utility of animation as a method of sugar-coating informational content, often produced in close collaboration with military administrators. Enter Victory Through Air Power Disney’s bizarre, long-forgotten contribution to the war effort, a de facto documentary about the first thirty-odd years of flight that quickly segues into an instructional battle plan for domination of the skies. Not as overtly offensive as some other works of this era (Bugs Bunny’s harrying of a buck-toothed, grossly stereotypical Japanese trooper comes to mind) it’s still a chilling relic of a time when such twisted nativism seemed like a matter of national security to many. Utilizing the familiar textures and gestures of mid-century animation toward this noble purpose, the film at its best mirrors the precisely automated majesty of Fantasia. Yet it’s almost impossible to appreciate it as pure art, thanks to the ever-present thrum of its subtextual engines—advocating the murder of millions of innocent civilians through indiscriminate, wide-ranging urban bombing campaigns—a message not quite adequately mitigated by anthropomorphized bombs and bloodless invocations of cities on fire.
Things start off a little bit lighter. Victory Through Air Power opens on a breezy note, as an illuminative history of flight, winsomely chronicling the experiments Wright Brothers and the progressive innovations which built upon their invention, many of them occurring due to the collision of early aeronautics with the logistical demands of World War I. Before the fighting starts, the film recalls Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, its litany of gonzo plane designs, daring airmen and strange adventures conveyed in a divertingly soft color palette, one that seems perversely designed to match the hellish crust of reds, browns and oranges that marks the movie’s later passages. Overall, the tone is closer to the elegiac tenor of the director’s later The Wind Rises, although the essential darkness of the story is always masked by a certain industrious eagerness, forcing a busy-beaver ebullience as it moves from civilian to military history and back, managing a nice assemblage of history and myth, narration and audio. The film’s two historical threads culminate in story of first dogfight, which is conveyed comically, as a mounting arms race between pilots, who progress from tossing rocks at one another to toting shotguns, soon replaced by mounted automatic weapons (the earliest, their barrels pointed directly forward over the front propeller, don’t work exactly as intended).
It’s interesting to consider Victory Through Air Power as the work of a stable of pacifist craftsmen (whatever Walt Disney’s political shortcomings, warmongering didn’t seem to be among them, and the leftist proclivities of 1940s writers and animators are well known) forced into adopting the endorsement of wholesale slaughter for purposes of national self-preservation. Thus as in The Wind Rises, the progress from civilian to weapon use has straightforward but somewhat melancholy character, the sense of buoyancy fading as the joyful depiction of the magic of flight cedes to a dull recounting of attack plans and battle strategies.
Still, despite the film’s generally apolitical character, bits of commentary leak out, most impressively in a parallel pair of scenes, which convey this transition with grotesque economy. The first portrays the first ever overseas flight, a jaunty 1909 affair in which Louis Blériot scudded over the English Channel and back from Calais; the accompanying animation imagines a peaceful pastoral scene, with salutatory leaflets dropped on field-sleeping shepherds as a kind of gentle prank. The second scene reuses the dreamy narration of the previous, only this time, it’s over an apocalyptic rendering of English bombers roaring en masse back over the Channel, passing over the ravaged ruin of Dunkirk on their way to rain hellfire down on the German city of Köln.
The film ultimately remains caught between these two poles, of using animation to dynamically convey objective information and as a tool to convince ordinary people of the necessity of bombing other ones into oblivion. Considering how little the American populace has to do with strategic wartime decisions, the arguments presented here seem less like a referendum on the application of force outside a battlefield setting, and more like a salving preparation for the horrors that would follow, from the large-scale firebombing of German cities to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would follow two years later. What results is an anti-war, informative story that also argues for the inevitability of violence against those ill-prepared to receive its brunt, for the pragmatic purpose that this is the fastest way of returning to a state of peace. In this sense, Victory Through Air Power functions as a summary of the war effort in miniature, while detailing a divergence that still persists to this day, as the pall of bloody conflict, and American involvement therein, continues to persist around the world.
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