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Rating: Spend for the Axes...or save for taxes?
If Walt Disney's artistic-cinematic activity is well known and appreciated by the general public, by contrast, his political work, as well as the ideals of the same matrix, are subject to the most diverse (and desperate) controversies. Even today, books and booklets, scandalous biographies, and belated scoops attempt to unmask the real Disney, who cleverly hid behind innocent and frivolous little animals and/or masks of noble morality. Perhaps the artist who (more than others) opted for animation aimed at exporting utopian messages of goodwill, harmony, serenity, and positivity, in reality discouraged himself and for himself the ethics that Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are accustomed to display in their misadventures.
Suspicions/premonitions of pro-Hitlerism have always based their truth on the connection between Walt and Henry Ford, the latter, in turn, being a "pen" friend of the Führer, even a financier of the NSDAP. Further rumors about this emphasize Disney's hatred towards the Jewish component of the United States, which controlled the major Hollywood studios at the time and was accused of repeatedly rejecting the Master's proposals during his early artistic days. In short, a cauldron of gossip that over time has taken on connotations more akin to scandal mongering rather than a scientific-biographical analysis of the author.
The comprehensive view of The Spirit Of '43 would dispel any thesis capable of overlapping Disney with Nazi-fascism. On the contrary, it would exalt him as the first devotee to the Stars and Stripes, a celestial messenger of exportable American Democracy. Admirable. Unless a small precision is enacted: the cartoon (and even the more famous and hilarious Der Fuehrer's Face) would be nothing more than the material execution of an "order" given by President Roosevelt to Walt, that is, the creation of animated shorts with a propagandistic and anti-Axis aim (in the midst of the allied recovery post-Stalingrad/Midway/El Alamein). Doubts remain. Patience. We will continue to endure amusing little stories.
More than a real short film even remotely intended to make the viewer smile, The Spirit Of '43 outlines a sort of colossal newsreel of (just and necessary) war promotion: the character Donald Duck is forced to fight between one alter ego urging him to spend his just cashed paycheck on frivolities, on the other side, an ancestral Uncle Scrooge invites the naive duck not to squander his earnings in anticipation of income taxes destined for military action. "Every dollar you waste on something unnecessary is a dollar given to the Axis".
A rough and cavernous voiceover specifically inserted in the minifilm accentuates, even exacerbates Donald's doubts: he will eventually naturally choose the path of investment in peace and democracy. After this excellent demonstration of loyalty to the homeland, Donald fades and purely warlike images debut (already routine in other Disney cartoons produced for the same purposes, like The New Spirit): Nazi planes shot down by their allied counterparts, cannon and machine gun factories in action, molten metal flows ready to solidify into bombs, Japanese ships strafed and sunk, "monstrous" German submarines immediately torpedoed, swastikas swallowed by whirlpools, purple skies invaded by roaring propellers...guns, guns, guns, all kinds of guns. A provocative and warmongering finale illustrating the reason for the deprivations and austerity imposed on the American population (already tested after the crisis of '29): the increase of the made-in-USA war industry, necessarily to be enhanced. Then, a single, unique promise, metaphorically represented by a line of planes silhouetted on the horizon, departing toward the cursed unknown: the certain defeat of the enemy (who in effect hasn't yet lost their nerve and still believes in final victory) and the return of global peace.
Undoubtedly, the short film clearly and decidedly less frivolously illustrates the campaign of exaltation of the allied armies, focusing primarily on the economic commitment of American subjects towards their army bogged down in the Pacific, Europe, and North Africa. If Der Fuehrer's Face hilariously and grotesquely demystifies the Nazi-fascist message, The Spirit Of '43 lampoons the enemy Heads of State with less effectiveness and "funny" spontaneity, deliberately leaving aside any humorous and "sbellicamento" (belly-laugh) intent: the seriousness/tragedy of the international war situation indeed compels an unbreakable bond between the real "Spirit of 1943" and the (necessary) feeling of resurgence of the maligned Nation and, therefore, rigid and straightforward the message provided by the cartoon must result. It's impossible to compare the humorous effectiveness of the pseudo-fascist Donald, clumsy and naive in Der Fuehrer's Face, with the same one in "The Spirit Of '43", less comical, no truly notable gags, tending to seriousness, reflection, politics. Even Nazi symbols are dismissed in a jiffy, without any good-natured "mockery"; there is indeed no more time to desecrate the swastika and set it to the pillory (a famous example is Chaplin's The Great Dictator): it needs to be immediately taken down, and this responsibility is pocketed by the Flag, the only one to triumph, albeit fictitiously, on all fronts where it is involved.
The cartoon effectively loses itself in a chaotic, boisterous, noisy rhetoric: stars and stripes everywhere, depicted even above anthropomorphized "bellows," radiant American planes soaring over the oceans, scarlet smokestacks, bank marks and associated money directed to counters almost like pieces of an assembly line on a mechanical conveyor, gloomy or radiant chromatic backgrounds depending on whether the American hero or Axis aircraft appears, sinusoidal effect symphonies praising/condemning the enemy or patriot based on the situation, the tenor interjection of the narrative voice at the taxes... a genuine propagandistic frenzy that (let's say it) would be the perfect coronation of the demagogic-media activity of the Istituto Luce and/or the Ministry of Propaganda of the Reich.
And yet, despite the cartoon's delusions of grandeur, one is left shocked by such an outpouring of messages, aspirations, intents, and feelings: casting Donald as the role of the Average American, simple and easily corruptible from both sides, Disney simplifies Roosevelt's message praising the "spirit" of peaceful American democracy. Through the rotation of simple, straightforward, concrete, and realistic images, perhaps extreme, the Master addresses all the children of Uncle Tom of goodwill, poor and rich, intellectuals and ignorant, conservatives and reformists, offering them a "massificatory" propaganda typical of Nazi-fascist war rhetoric, nevertheless the only one that can violently open the most disinterested and stubborn mind to the set mission: the worldwide excommunication of totalitarianism and its abolition from the human mind.
Did the "mobilizing" mission of The Spirit Of '43 work? Evidently, if the allied recovery began with dynamism and constancy precisely in 1943, the "Spirit" illustrated by Disney and Donald could consider itself satisfied with its work of radicalization in the "swampy" consciences of the Yankees. Certainly more incisive and meaningful than the pompous and unnatural rhetoric of Goebbels & co.
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