Éducation à la mort

Forget anything you may have come to expect from Disney if and when you see this short. There is nothing cute here. The animation is excellent, is very grim and stark and very chilling. It is the most deathly serious animated short I have seen produced by a studio based in the United States. The only one I've ever seen that may match it is Balance, a German short made almost fifty years later. Education For Death is a short you won't easily forget once you've seen it and it's a shame that The Mouse hasn't seen fit to release it on a DVD along with things like Victory Through Air Power, Der Fuehrer's Face, Reason and Emotion, New Spirit and other works Disney made as a part of the war effort during World War II. An excellent production that deserves to be in print and seen. Most highly recommended.

While most of Disney's cartoons are funny, this one was quite serious. It tells of how a boy named Hans is abducted into the Nazi way of life starting from kindergarten when he learns the familiar story of Sleeping Beauty only he learns the Nazi version of it where the wicked witch is democracy and Sleeping Beauty is German. I bet you can probably guess who the prince is. Later Hans is taught that the weak don't deserve to live and that Germans are the master race. I think Walt Disney depicts the evils of Nazism quite well in this short. The outside world was probably quite shocked about this when they saw it. An innocent child being brought up to be a Nazi who says nothing but what others want him to say, to think only the way others want him to think, and to do only what others want him to do. To top it all off, having to support Der Fueher (Hitler) and dying in battle just for him. Isn't that pathetic? The narrator says "By now Hans has completed his education. His education for death!" He was right about that too. This is quite a touching story and I think that everyone should get the chance to see it. Unfortunately this short is not "politically correct" enough to be aired on the Disney Channel or Toon Disney. I hope that one day Disney will show these rare cartoons on TV. You're probably wondering where I saw this cartoon. Well, I own a video of rare Disney shorts that I got from a collector.

Short animation flick follows the early years of 'Hans', who has the bad luck of being born in Hitler Germany. He's brainwashed into becoming a nazi, and ultimately dies at the battlefield, as thousands of his fellow Germans did.

With first viewing you think Disney's thought on nazi-Germany (which is portrayed as a fat, ugly and gullible woman) is a bit too simplistic and one-dimensional, but in the end, when you think of it, it's more of a sad story about the young kid than one of hatred towards the nazi's.

The animations are amazing and the content (with what we know how) grim, dark and scary. Hard to rate this, but I'll give it a 7/10. Be sure to catch this if you can.

This is a Disney cartoon made during the war years, though it's not the usual Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck style cartoon. Instead, Disney and other American cartoon studios made cartoons for propaganda purposes. The idea was to educate the public about why we are fighting as well as what life would be like if you lived with the enemy--the loss of freedom, the loss of free will and loss of democratic law. Some may see them today as heavy-handed or jingoistic, but the cause was just and they were very useful positive propaganda. If you hate these wartime films, then just get over it or don't watch them--but they are an important part of our history and I am glad that Disney has finally agreed to release them once again.

This film is about a fictitious child born and raised in Nazi Germany. How the child is indoctrinated from an early age to devalue sympathy and see his leader as his hero are chronicled in this film very effectively. Essentially, the story you see is true as Germany was raising their children this way and it gave insight for the viewers to understand the Nazi mind. Through excellent production values and storytelling, the message is put across successfully.

Simply put, this is perhaps the most effective political-propaganda short I've seen, particularly since it was made by Disney.

There is some of the good Disney comedy in there (a hilarious retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty tale, only this time to fit the Nazi teachings; and some *clever* re-paintings of Hitler and others), but overall it's a grim and depressing short. It subtly represents the true cruelty of the Nazi, how they treated their soldiers, and especially how they made the parents raise the children who were to become soldiers. It all comes to the inevitable, and again, frightening ending.

Highly recommended if you're curious about the Wartime shorts, or as an example if you are doing a report of Political Propaganda.

My rating: 10/10.