Victory Through Air Power (film)
Victory Through Air Power is an American animated documentary propaganda film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by United Artists on July 17, 1943. It is based on the 1942 book Victory Through Air Power by Alexander P. de Seversky. De Seversky appeared in the film, an unusual departure from the Disney animated feature films of the time.[1]
Victory Through Air Power
Animated sequences:
James Algar
Clyde Geronimi
Jack Kinney
de Seversky scenes:
H.C. Potter
Story direction:
Perce Pearce
Story adaptation:
T. Hee
Erdman Penner
Bill Cottrell
James Brodero
George Stallings
Jose Rodriguez
- July 17, 1943
65 min
United States
English
$788,000
$799,000
Edward H. Plumb, Paul J. Smith and Oliver Wallace were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.
Production[edit]
Walt Disney read Victory through Air Power and felt that its message was so important that he personally financed the animated production of the book.[2] The film was primarily created to express Seversky's theories to government officials and the public. Film critic Richard Schickel says that Disney "pushed the film out in a hurry, even setting aside his distrust of limited animation under the impulses of urgency" (the only obvious use of limited animation, however, is in diagrammatic illustrations of Seversky's talking points; these illustrations featured continuous flowing streams of iconic aircraft, forming bridges or shields, and munitions flowing along assembly lines). It was not until 1945 Disney was able to pay off his $1.2 million ($17m 2021) war film deficit. After Disney's main distributor at the time RKO Radio Pictures refused to release the film in theaters, Walt decided to have United Artists (the distributor of many of his shorts between 1932 and 1937) release it instead, making it the first and only Disney animated feature to be released by a different film studio other than RKO or Walt Disney Studios.
Home media[edit]
After its release and re-release in 1943 and 1944, there was no theatrical release for 60 years, perhaps because it was seen as propaganda, or perhaps because it was deemed offensive to Germans and Japanese.[10] It was, however, available in 16 mm prints and occasionally screened in film history retrospectives. Additionally, the introductory "history-of-aviation" scene was excerpted in various episodes of the Disney anthology series on TV.[11] In 2004, the film was released on DVD as part of the Walt Disney Treasures collection Walt Disney on the Front Lines. After the war, Disney's characters, especially Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, were enthusiastically received in Japan and Germany, where they remain immensely popular today.[12]