Der Fuehrer's Face

During the 1940's, Disney was putting out quite a few of war propaganda films. This Academy Award Winning Donald Duck short is an incredible piece of animation that id, genuinely, really good.

It mocks the Nazi party, by showing Donald Duck struggling to fit in and work for the Nazi with their low food source and the hours and hours of hard work they enforce upon others. There's even a line in which a Nazi announces that they're going to work for 48 hours a day (really clever line).

It's genuinely really funny and clever, as well as being beautifully animated and extremely effective with it's anti-Nazi message.

It's also a cartoon that I feel everyone should experience based on how purely weird and surreal it is seeing Donald Duck being a Nazi. Watching Donald salute a picture of Adolf Hitler after walking through his swastika filled home is wonderfully weird and surreal. It's messed up seeing such an iconically wacky and classic cartoon character suddenly hate Jews so much.

Great short

This is such a great propaganda piece! Donald Duck is a worker (well, slave really) in Nutzi land, which basically is nazi Germany. There's a fantastic piece when Donald is working in a factory in a way that reminds us of Chaplin in Modern Times. Throughout the film a really catchy song is playing that is making fun of Hitler.

In the end it turns to be all a dream and Donald is waking up in the USA. He turns patriotic while stating he's so glad to be a citizen in the United States. Oh well, it's propaganda, people!

Propaganda so well made, it should be hailed (no pun intended) for it, as the movie makes fun of Hitler and his gang in an effective, but also hilarious way. 8/10!

In this marvelously surreal and funny short, Donald Duck is a subject of Nazi Germany, forced to make munitions for the Reich. He has to endure abysmal food rations (wooden bread, Aroma of Bacon and Eggs, and coffee brewed from a single bean), superhuman workloads, 30 seconds of forced calisthenics for his "vacation", and an unrelenting barrage of Hitler portraits which he must hail unfailingly - or else! It's all too much for Donald, who has a nervous breakdown, and the film disintegrates into a bizarre phantasmagoria of dancing missiles and stomping boots. Thankfully, it was all just a bad dream, and Donald is relieved to see that the hailing shadow on the wall is cast by his Statue of Liberty on the window sill. As he kisses it he proclaims, wearing his star-spangled jammies, "Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America." This cartoon, perhaps the most savagely satirical Disney ever made, was a sensation in its day, winning the Oscar and spawning a hit song. After the war, however, it was shelved and kept out of public circulation - and not without reason. Now it has been released on DVD as part of the excellent Walt Disney Treasures collection, "Walt Disney on the Front Lines", for discerning film buffs to enjoy. Many will find it disquieting to see a beloved American icon wearing a brownshirt uniform with swastika armband, hailing pictures of Hitler, and goose stepping to work; but then, Donald doesn't seem too thrilled about it, either. In no way does this cartoon promote Nazism. Instead, it punctures its pretensions of superiority by reducing its brutality to absurd slapstick, turning its Ubermensch into buffoonish caricatures. (Bear in mind that at the time of this cartoon the true extent of Hitler's inhumanity was unknown to the Allied countries.) As Mel Brooks has noted, the best way to deal with monsters like Hitler is to laugh at them. So go ahead and laugh, laugh, right at Der Fuehrer's Face.

In World War II, a marching band playing "Der Fuehrer's Face" passes by Donald Duck's house. He awakes, has a poor breakfast with stale bread. Then he goes to an army factory where he works in the production of ammunition brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda. Donald Duck has a nervous breakdown with the stressed situation but when he awakes, he finds that he had a nightmare and he actually lives in United States of America.

The historical cartoon "Der Fuehrer's Face" is an effective and caustic propaganda in times of war. Despite being dated in 2009, the despair of Donald Duck is still a hilarious fun against the Nazism and tyranny of Hitler. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

The first time I saw screen caps of this short cartoon, I didn't know what to think. Then I saw it, and realized how clever those guys at Disney are.

I won't really give anything away (it's about Donald Duck working for the Nazis, and in true Disney style, comes to a cute ending), but you should just see it yourself. It's a superb example of how bad the Nazi soldiers were treated and overworked mixed with comedy. About finding it, you can download it off a few internet joke sites (someone of an IMDb thread for this movie posted a link from steak and cheese DOT COM), and it was recently released as part of a Disney box set of War-time shorts commemorating the WWII era. It's also available in a lot of college libraries, in a 16mm print.

My rating: 10/10 (a pretty good cartoon poking fun at the WWII political state).