War A-For-Effort

DVD File interviews Dave Bossert, producer of the Walt Disney Treasures: On The Front Lines set. We've been watching this lately. Plowing through the wartime entertainment shorts with Donald Duck and co. makes me appreciate the jazzy knowingness and frenetic pacing of the Warner Bros cartoons. Honestly, much of them just poke along aimlessly and the gags are more silly than funny - but at least they look great. Indeed, it's stunning visuals alone that drive the rarely screened 1943 feature Victory Though Air Power. The movie is very "of its time" and full of dry speechifying by a live-action narrator, but sumptuous animated graphics demonstrating abstract warfare tactics make it a must-see for designers and other artsy types. Disney's flair for memorable visuals is put to even better use in educational shorts like "The Grain that Built a Hemisphere" - a history of corn told with gorgeous streamline moderne imagery lifted straight off a WPA mural. Give me stuff like this and I'll put up with the modern-day Disney's tiresome PC pussyfooting any day.
Posted by mhinrichs at June 8, 2004 01:04 PM