Studio: Walt Disney Productions
Distributor: RKO Radio Pictures
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
A narrator tells the story of Hans, a boy born in Nazi Germany. At his birth his parents must prove their Aryan ancestry to an official, who approves the name Hans and enrols the baby in the service of the state. As he grows, the fairy tales he hears are rewritten as Nazi propaganda: Sleeping Beauty becomes Germany, awakened by a heroic knight, Hitler, who struggles to climb onto his horse. When Hans falls ill, his mother fears the state will take him away because the regime has no use for the weak. Back at school, the teacher draws a fox eating a rabbit, and when Hans feels sorry for the rabbit he is made to wear a dunce's cap until he recants and condemns the weak. He joins the burning of books and watches the Bible replaced by Mein Kampf, and he grows up through the Hitler Youth into a soldier, his mind closed by a muzzle and blinkers. At the end he marches off to war in an endless column, and the marchers dissolve into rows of identical graves.
Why It Matters
- The schoolroom scene, in which a child's sympathy for a rabbit is crushed by his teacher and classmates, is a chillingly effective piece of animation, and Bill Tytla's sequences of the marching Nazis have a weight and menace rare in Disney's work. The ending, in which soldiers become graves, gives the film a seriousness its satirical moments never undercut.
- It is one of the most ambitious films Disney made under its wartime government contracts. Based on Gregor Ziemer's non-fiction book about Nazi education, it is less a comedy than an animated essay on indoctrination, showing how far the studio's craft could be turned to serious persuasion.
Notes and Trivia
- Disney made dozens of shorts under government contracts during the war, which helped keep the studio running after Fantasia lost money.
- See also: All Together (1942), Blitz Wolf (1942).