Der Fuehrer's Face

I once heard that Disney's marketing department was concerned about how Mickey Mouse was depicted in 1995's Runaway Brain, because Mickey's brain was switched with an evil brain, making Mickey a rampaging villain in the cartoon. I wonder what they would think if they had to market Der Fuehrer's Face with Donald Duck wearing a Nazi uniform and, at one point, resembling Hitler. Of course, this isn't the real Donald (as it wasn't the real Mickey in Runaway Brain); it was all a bad dream for Donald. However, the image alone of Donald in `Nutzi Land' is somewhat shocking.

Nevertheless, Der Fuehrer's Face exhibits some of the greatest gags I've seen in any cartoon. In Donald's nightmare, he has to do some odd exercises that contort his body into a swastika-like shape. His cuckoo clock bird looks like Hitler as he comes out of the clock doing a Heil Hitler salute. And poor Donald is forced to work in an ammunition factory where he has to salute Hitler every time he sees his picture, which is about after every other ammunition shell. It's just so surprising to seeing Hitler and the Nazis being made fun of in this way, in a cartoon no less, you can't help but laugh.

Finally Donald wakes up in his red, white, and blue pajamas and is relieved to see his Statue of Liberty souvenir and realizing he's always lived in the `good, old United States of America.' This cartoon is really quite a sight to see. It makes fun of the enemy, gives people a good laugh, and displays some great patriotism. A great cartoon, in my opinion, even if it borders on controversial nowadays. It's a product of its time, and it's just a fine piece of entertainment.

My IMDb Rating: 10/10

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.

WWII-era filmmakers used two broad approaches when attempting to discredit Adolf Hitler and Germany in general. The first, and least interesting in my view, was to treat them with the utmost seriousness, painting the Nazis are perverted, sadistic and evil baby-killers, and the like. Secondly, there was the comedic approach, by which Hitler was belittled through having entire audiences laughing in his face. 'The Great Dictator (1940)' and 'To Be or Not to Be (1942)' accomplish this hilariously well, but what about the younger demographics? To help communicate the evils of Nazism to children, the Walt Disney cartoon 'Der Fuhrer's Face (1942)' tosses Donald Duck (voiced by Clarence Nash) amid Hitler's militaristic regime, where he slaves away for "48 hours a day" in a munitions factory, continually bombarded with the swastika symbol and the phrase "heil Hitler!" At the end of the cartoon, after a surreal montage of Nazi (or "Nutzi," as the film says) oppression, Donald wakes up in America, thankfully sighing "am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America."

Despite winning an Oscar in 1943 for Best Short Subject Cartoon, 'Der Fuehrer's Face' was rarely seen following the end of the war. As the atrocities of Hitler's "Final Solution" came to light, the Nazi badge quickly became something, not to be merely ridiculed, but to be loathed. Nevertheless, the sheer audacity of Jack Kinney's cartoon has to be seen to be believed. There's hardly a frame in which the swastika is not visible in one form or another, and Donald is ludicrously forced to bark "Heil Hitler" whenever he comes across a photograph of the Fuhrer. The cartoon's climax is a dizzyingly-surreal montage in which anthropomorphised Nazi machinery relentlessly beats Donald into submission. It's all a little disconcerting, as was its intention, but it's also a lot of fun. Also featured is Oliver Wallace's song "Der Fuehrer's Face," which was covered by Spike Jones and His City Slickers with great success. Indeed, the name of this cartoon was changed from "Donald Duck in Nutzi Land" to capitalise on the song's popularity.

This is one of the most underrated Disney shorts ever made during WW2.

It's been banned since the end of WW2. Due to it having Nazis and the over use of the quote "Heil Hitler".

Donald finds himself a Nazi in a Nazi-Land where everything is a Neo Swiss Symbol from telephone posts to trees.

Donald gets a wake up call by a marching band of Nazis.

Donald then gets drag all the way to a Bomb Shell factory where he has to screw in every single War Head that comes out of the factory.

Not only that but he also has to say Heil Hitler when he's told to or when he sees a picture of Hitler.

This whole thing drives him mad. This reality he's in is too good to be true.

I really liked this short. The "Der Furher's Face" theme will get stuck in your head after watching it. It's also one of the few Disney shorts that poke fun into the Nazis more than the other ones.

So if you like Donald Duck and WW2 theme cartoons then you'll surely like this one.

You're able to see it on the "Disney Treasures Front Line" Box Set.

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