America’s entry into World War II, depending on which economist you listened to, finally lifted the country out of the last draggy bits of the Great Depression; yet it was not all good news for everybody*. Walt Disney, was among that small population of folks who’d done just fine for himself during the worst of the Depression, riding the public’s appetite for silly, diverting entertainment as successfully as any movie producer of that golden age for escapism, who then found himself in a bit of trouble once the war years started up.
What happened to Disney and his company in the years following the Pearl Harbor attack might be nicely described as “a rough patch” (the less-nice way of describing it would be “a Brobdingnagian clusterfuck”). The summer, 1942 release of Bambi was, if not a flop on the scale of Fantasia, proof enough that war audiences had a new set of tastes that Disney’s painterly fables couldn’t sate. Just as soon as Dumbo had allowed the studio to crawl back out of the financial hole it had been in, Bambi re-opened the hole, and that, plus the sudden loss of staff due to animators joining the military, plus the closing of the international markets which had been such an important part of Disney’s business model previously, meant that the studio was a breath away from extinction.
The solution was found, partially, in government grants: for the bulk of the war years, Disney functioned the the producer of dozens cheap, fast training films, the most limited animations ever made by the company (in recognition of their need to be produced quickly, with a skeleton crew), and aided no doubt by Walt’s eager jingoism, the company transformed into a propaganda unit of sorts, both officially (Saludos Amigos, the 1942 package feature, was co-financed by the government as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy), and unofficially (the long list of films in which Pluto or Donald or whom you will learned about soldiering, rationing, and the like).
Even so, there’s no movie in the Disney vault quite like Victory Through Air Power. Inspired by the 1942 book of that name by Alexander P. de Seversky, the film is sheer propaganda, by which I am only making a categorical statement, not an aesthetic judgment. It is an advocacy piece for a very specific military plan, marshaling any evidence which would support that plan and denigrating or ignoring anything else. It is a movie wholly dedicated to advancing an argument. A damn far cry from watching woodland animals frolic around a princess in the woods, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody – I suspect, not even to the eternally optimistic Walt himself – Victory Through Air Power lost money. It is easily the driest, least-entertaining, and grimmest feature ever made by the Disney animators, and the fact it was released theatrically at all – by United Artists, not Disney’s customary distributors at RKO, who felt that the project was a surefire money-loser – is testament to how much weight the name “Walt Disney” yet carried in July, 1943.
Here, then, is the film’s claim: Seversky, a decorated hero and great airman, a Russian immigrant with a keen desire that his adopted home should avoid being destroyed by the Nazis. It was his strong believe that the Allied countries were not sufficiently exploiting the possibilities of long-range bombing aircraft, and that if the United States would devote its energies to the creation of a fleet of bombers (which had mostly been designed already), it would enjoy a significant tactical advantage over Japan and Germany, whose strategies up until that point – that is, early 1942 – had exploited the fact that their opponents did not have the ability to seriously mount an air-based attack
Victory Through Air Power is a fairly excellent piece of propaganda, in that it communicates its point so persuasively that even without the benefit of hindsight, Seversky’s theories seem inescapably wise. It’s structure is quite ingenious, beginning with a silly cartoon typical of Disney’s cheap, war-time animation (and this sequence, which has sometimes been shown independently of the feature as “The History of Aviation”, was the relic of a different project, which perhaps explains why it is so different from the remainder of the film). This eases the viewer into the film, making it seem like something that might be even marginally fun.
The middle section of the film is at times unbearably expository; and how could it not be? It consists of a man droning on in a single room filled with globes and maps about flight radii and supply lines. The live-action sequences feature Seversky were all directed by H.C. Potter, an RKO contract filmmaker of little historical importance, and his task was primarily to find things for Seversky to do that would keep the film at least a tiny bit lively. He succeeded, at the “tiny bit” at least; there’s only so much one can really do to keep subject matter this dry from being boring, though there are a few moments in which Seversky’s sternly professional delivery and the violent subject matter he discusses contrast with one another such that there’s a certain discomfiture produced that might not have been entirely accidental; even today, when a man with a pronounced but not thick Russian accent muses about the destruction of all we hold dear, it’s hard not to perk up and take notice.
Still, the film is much more effective during the animation sequences – directed by James Algar, Clyde Geronimi, and Jack Kinney under the general supervision of David Hand (his last work at Disney, after leading Snow White and the Seven Dwarf and Bambi, along with many shorts) – with the slightly less bland narration of Art Baker taking over for Seversky, and the animators finding a number of ways to dramatise tactical discussions in a way that isn’t totally visually flat.
(Limited animation – using only a few images per second, or images which are mostly still except for their position in the frame – was only just starting to make itself known in the early 1940s; its most famous and influence practitioners were the animators at UPA in the post-war years, though it’s worth noting that much of the UPA staff had come from Disney before the 1941 strike. An early half-experiment in limited animation was Chuck Jones’s 1942 The Dover Boys, and if my eyes do not deceive me completely, I see an echo of that legendary short in the “History of Aviation” sequence in our present subject).
The film’s imagery is undeniably beautiful: drawings that look to be watercolors or pencil sketches, highly realistic depictions of planes and other mechanisms of warfare created by Disney artists at the height of their skills, in a most unusual mood.
The finest moments in the film – and they are not too rare, at that – achieve a sublime measure of visual poetry, blending the strict, even banal realism demanded by the script’s argumentative needs, with hazy, imaginative compositions that recall, out of all the rest of Disney’s output, the Impressionistic rendering of the woodland backgrounds in Bambi more than anything else. Taken out of context, there are moments in Victory Through Air Power whose abstract elegance is most enviable; in context, of course, this is a depiction of the hardness of war whose painterly edges are both ironic and – since this is certainly not an anti-war film – somehow exhilarating.
I am chiefly thinking of a repeated image of Nazi Germany as the grotesque, smoke-belching industrial hub of a wheel of evil. Drenched in reds and blacks, it is a hellish image.
That’s hindsight for you, though. At the time, the concluding scenes of the movie could only have suggested to the viewer the efficacy of the system Seversky wanted to put into place, and it does so tremendously well. A tremendous box office failure, it probably didn’t move the populace to agitate for the creation of a dedicated Air Force (which did not happen until after the war), but it didn’t need to. It only needed to impress a small number of decision makers; and it did. According to one story, at the urging of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt himself sat down to watch the film, and it was sufficient to convince him of the need for a strong commitment to a strategic air campaign against Germany and Japan.
Movies don’t get much more significant than that.
f*To put it mildly.