“Reason and Emotion”

Wartime propaganda cartoons are an interesting thing; from an artistic perspective, there actually not all that bad (Keep in mind that many of these cartoons where showed before movies, and where intended to reach kids and adults alike.) The biggest studies that made these kind of cartoons where: Disney and Warner Brothers. Of the two, Warner Brothers attempted to be more frantic and comic, often dropping Bugs Bunny or Daffy into war zones (the shows where also incredibly racist, but that’s a different story.) Disney, on the other hand, created more quite and thought-out pieces of work. Like this one:



I suppose it’s too much to ask for a Disney cartoon from the 1940's to be philosophically perfect. Still, there is actually some good stuff there (though the film rather explicitly upholds the reason/emotion dichotomy.) It is surprising to find something so pro-reason, especially in wartime cartoons, which tended to appeal heavily to emotions. Disney was more positive then that, and made films that even today the company can be proud of (unlike Warner Brothers, which tries to hide much of their wartime propaganda.)

Though I do have one major complaint: why does ‘reason’ have to be a balding, scrawny guy in his mid-to-late forties?