Dr. Toon: When Toons Hate
For most of their early history, animated cartoons were instruments of merriment and laughter. Jocular cartoon characters in comic situations represented the majority of American animated entertainment. Despite the occasional happily-ever-after animated romance, cartoons were amusing rather than musing, and so it remained throughout the 1950s. Eventually, sophisticated pioneers such as John Hubley considered the human condition with somewhat less levity. Still later, scorching iconoclasts such as Ralph Bakshi poured animated gasoline on the dark embers smoldering beneath urban America. Whether animation presented hilarity, encouraged introspection, or engendered shock, there were always artistic and narrative themes that marked cartoons as the art they truly were.
There have, however, been shocking variations that momentarily removed animated shorts from the province of art. These aberrations occurred during World War II, and all of them concerned the Pacific Theater conflict with Japan. While there have been notable examples of stereotype in America cartoons of that era targeting Blacks, Native Americans, Jews and other peoples and races, they appeared to exist in a cultural context that condoned them as typical entertainment. Ignorance and insensitivity were their hallmarks, rather than abject hatred. At no time ever in the history of animation, however, was racism, dehumanization or contempt as evident as it was against the Japanese people and their Asian culture.
Authors Michael S. Shull and David E. Wilt gave particular notice to these racist works in their excellent book Doing their Bit: Wartime Animated Short Films 1939-1945. Shull and Wilt offered several possible explanations for the virulence of anti-Japanese cartoons. One reason was the tolerance of racist attitudes and prejudices prevalent in 1940s America; many ethnic groups were regularly caricatured in the nation's animation studios, and the Japanese were an irresistible target during wartime. It is mentioned that the Germans and Italians were White and perceived as having a more civilized culture. Therefore, their leaders were ridiculed more than their ethnicities.
Another reason postulated by Shull and Wilt was that the Japanese were seen as more barbaric than our Teutonic foes due to their "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor and the atrocities committed on Bataan against American servicemen. At the time, the authors argue, the full extent of Germany's satanic designs for genocide was not fully known by the American public. Thus, the Japanese were more savagely ridiculed in America's cartoon shorts. The authors cogently note that the studios had little to lose by ridiculing a people that would certainly not be showing up at local movie theaters at any rate; they would be biding their time in detention camps.
These are impeccable points, and if anything, understate the case. By 1943, even the Office of War Information was reportedly taken aback by the unvarnished hatred and racism that permeated these wartime cartoons, and warned studios not to heap the invective too high. After all, the Chinese, so racially similar to the Japanese, were our allies and it would do little good to offend them as well. Also, fully half of the American dead in WWII -- 150,000 men -- were killed fighting the Japanese in the Pacific Theater. As Shull and Wilt point out, portraying the Japanese as stupid, chattering incompetents indirectly belittled the fighting prowess of our own troops.
Some of these cartoons are available through comprehensive DVD compilations such as Popeye the Sailor, Volume Three (Warner Home Video). Most can also be seen on YouTube and even ordered through some of the Web's backstreet channels. With some effort, I have managed to see and review them all, and I assume that you can do the same. There is really not much to add to Shull and Wilt's categorical work; the authors of Doing Their Bit do their bit in describing the anti-Japanese films and the reasons behind their vehemence. Only one thing is left out of the account, and that is what it is like to actually sit down and watch them.
Perhaps the most notable feature of these cartoons is that they are generally not funny. It inevitably seems that whatever humor is intended is clearly secondary to the message of contempt and belittlement, the vicious caricatures of slanted eyes surrounded by thick glasses perched just above a set of impossibly protruding teeth. Through those teeth pour an unintelligible stream of high-pitched chatter, punctuated only by "So solly!" or "Honorable (this or that)". One particularly humorless and vile Warner short, "Tokio Jokio" (1943), is highly denigrating of Japanese culture and society; its agenda could not be more transparent. The goal of this cartoon was to engender contempt and hatred, and so extreme is this position that the cartoon's creators ended up looking more dehumanized than their target of ridicule.
These cartoons are difficult to view today. Racial hatred, similar to but far different from racial and ethnic caricature or burlesque, is a particularly ugly subject for film unless there is another, deeper message that can only be reached through accompanying modes of exposition (as in, for example, American History X). In its unvarnished form, racial hatred lacks any element of humor, perhaps the most crucial element in animated shorts of the 1940s. Worse, it renders peripheral gags just as humorless. Witness Popeye's imaginative transformation of a scrapped Japanese battleship into a cage for his captured enemies ("Scrap the Japs," 1942). Popeye's comic efforts feel soured when the captive Japanese morph into squealing, slit-eyed rats.
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