based on the book by Major Alexander P. de Seversky (1942)

story direction by Perce Pearce
scenes with Major Seversky directed by H.C. Potter
animation supervised by David Hand

Subway movie number two, and also an appendix to the Disney canon project. If you’ve been to the wikipedia list that we’re following you’ll have seen that there are several subsidiary lists, one of them being “Live-action films which feature Disney animation.” The first several entries on this list predate Disney’s first live-action film without animation (that being Treasure Island (1950)) and are thus particularly close genetic relatives to the animated features.

Chronologically speaking I have missed The Reluctant Dragon (1941), a behind-the-scenes mish-mosh movie that came between Fantasia and Dumbo. I’d like to see that. Victory Through Air Power is next on the list, though, and happens to fall exactly between Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, which is where we are broomlet-wise as well, so this is a fortuitous time to post about it. But I didn’t actually choose to watch it with that in mind – I just thought it would be an interesting one for the subway. And it was!

This movie is a riveting, remarkable piece of propaganda. “Propaganda” insofar as it exists entirely to put forth a particular point of view, but not in the standard sense that it coats it in entertainment and then sneakily plays on the emotions. It makes its case overtly and directly to the camera from start to finish. Any playing on the emotions is, in a sense, incidental, and completely transparent. Which is not to say that it’s not a vital part of what’s going on here. But the movie was strikingly devoid of that pernicious quality of total condescension that runs through most propaganda. Being manipulative in the context of an outright plea is different from being manipulative from behind a smokescreen of misdirection; this movie is a plea.

What I’m saying is that I found it basically sympathetic as a piece of work, to my great surprise. I don’t know whether the military arguments made here were smart, dumb, or too oversimplified to be legitimate, but I do know that they were presented more forcefully and vividly than I could ever have imagined. Major Seversky had a case to make; Walt Disney found it convincing, and wanted to help. But rather than making some “Disney cartoon equivalent” of Seversky’s argument, he used the considerable resources of his studio simply to make the argument itself, as is. No comedy here (well, a faint tiny bit during the early “history of aviation” segment), and no metaphors or allegories; just a military man telling you what he thinks the military should be doing. I don’t think there has ever been more attractive, better executed animation of arrows, routes, shifting borders, and strategic actions. It’s truly thrilling seeing Powerpoint material run through the Disney studio at its height, and I think even today, in our nerdy era obsessed with visualized data, information design people could learn from, and should study, this beautiful movie.

Seversky’s case, for those of you who don’t want to look it up, is essentially that a) air power is the most important force in the way war is now being fought and the U.S. needs to focus more military and industrial resources on it, and b) the only way to defeat the Japanese military is to bomb Japan, and the only way to accomplish that effectively is to develop planes with a longer range. There’s more to it, and every point is supported by a variety of arguments. History didn’t exactly go as he predicted but it’s not clear that he was wrong, either – at least not to me. A military historian might be able to shed some light on how smart this movie is, and I’d be interested to hear it, but during the watching it really wasn’t my concern.

It is important for me to note that I never once got even the slightest bit bored watching this movie, which is really saying something about the quality of the production.

Disney wanted to turn it around fast so there’s a lot of uncharacteristic “limited animation,” where static images slide across each other, etc. – but it’s some of the most effective, attractive limited animation I’ve ever seen. The paintings of battleships and airplanes are warm and oddly appealing. At least to me. The full animation of explosions and dogfights is generally gorgeous – and the culminating battle between a bald eagle and a world-clutching black octopus is as fine as anything in Fantasia. In its own weird muted way, this movie looks great.

The only other major movie I can think of in the “plea” genre is An Inconvenient Truth, which I didn’t see.

Living as we do in an era when war policy is again a particularly crucial and controversial subject, I was struck by how essentially analytic and rational the nature of the debate was, and saddened by the contrast with public discourse on comparable subjects in our time. Military resource management and strategy is a complicated subject, and this argument unapologetically embraced that as a fact. Nowadays, the public debate about what should be done with our military seems to be exclusively conducted in terms of gut feelings – “we can’t pull out of Iraq, it would be terrible” vs. “We have to pull out of Iraq, enough is enough.” Of course that debate is intractable; it has no components. If Dick Cheney showed me a bunch of animated arrows illustrating his point of view, I might still disagree with him but I would be comforted that he at least had it in him to render his point of view in terms of arrows. What happened to all the arrows?

Of Victory Through Air Power, James Agee apparently wrote:

I had the feeling I was sold something under pretty high pressure, which I don’t enjoy, and I am staggered at the ease with which such self-confidence, on matters of such importance, can be blared all over the nation, without cross-questioning.

That’s fair and reasonable of him. All the sadder that this now struck me as remarkably open and articulate for what it was. Agee’s complaint could today apply to pretty much all public political discourse in this country. No?

But I need to keep in mind that this wasn’t a political speech or an editorial in a paper; it was a movie from Walt Disney, in theaters. I would probably feel nothing but distaste and skepticism if I went to the theater and saw something like this today. Perhaps it’s genuinely unfair for this sort of content to venture into the theaters because it is so prohibitively expensive to get it there that a properly ventilated cross-questioning will never be possible. Seversky’s opponents were never going to be able to find some major animation studio to make their counter-film; perhaps that makes the film an abuse of power on Walt’s part, rather than fair use. Is it appropriate to use your Oscar acceptance speech to talk about Tibet? This is sort of a big complicated question, ethically, and I’m not at all interested in pursuing it right now.

Maybe in the comments section. But only if you insist.