To support the war effort, Disney designed emblems for the military, produced propaganda films and lent its iconic characters’ likenesses to different government agencies, among other activities. The studio provided training films and educational shorts at cost, with Walt saying, “I don’t like this profit during war … when people are out there giving up their lives.”
Free of charge, the company’s artists also created over 1,200 insignia for different military units, including the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) and the famed “Flying Tigers.” Disney-designed “nose art” featuring characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck adorned aircraft fuselages.
“The insignia were extremely effective for Disney as a morale booster,” says Bethanee Bemis, a scholar at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History whose research focuses on Disney’s impact on American culture. “[They were] a reminder of home [that soldiers] got to carry into battle.”
Disney also pitched in to raise funds for the war. In 1943, the company granted the Treasury Department permission to feature 22 characters, among them Donald Duck, Bambi and the seven dwarfs, on the borders of bond certificates made for children.
Though Disney only formally joined the cause after Pearl Harbor, executives had embraced defense-related projects before the attack, correctly sensing that military contracts could keep studio lights on and artists working. The pivot from whimsy to nuts and bolts was showcased in utilitarian titles like Four Methods of Flush Riveting, a 1942 mechanical training film made for Lockheed Martin.
As military personnel established operations in Burbank, Disney production surged tenfold from an average of 30,000 feet of film per year to 300,000. Some offerings catered directly to soldiers, covering such topics as Why We Fight and Tuning Transmitters. Others appealed to a broader audience: In the animated propaganda film Victory Through Air Power, for example, the company promoted the strategic advantages of long-range bombers. Disney taught science and civics lessons, too. The Grain That Built a Hemisphere—the first in a series of five films centered on agriculture—touted the importance of corn, while a radio in The New Spirit informed Donald Duck that real patriots pay timely “taxes to beat the Axis.
Mobilizing soldiers bound for combat and engaging civilians on the home front also led Disney to paint the enemy as immoral or even inhuman, most prominently in short films like Der Fuehrer’s Face, a 1943 cartoon starring Donald Duck; Commando Duck, which finds Donald facing down caricatured Japanese snipers in the Pacific; and Reason and Emotion, which argues that Hitler destroyed Germans’ reason by appealing to the emotions of fear, pride and hate.