Winsor McCay made the propaganda film The Sinking of the Lusitania, to stir up a nation's emotions against Germany.

The wartime cartoons of WWII are well known to all readers of this column, although they are typically examined for their racist content rather than as vehicles for propaganda or boosts to home front morale. Nearly every Hollywood studio put toons in uniform and some of the resulting shorts were so memorable that they transcended their times. Films such as Der Fuherer’s Face and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips were miniature depictions of a nation’s contemptuous attitude toward its deadliest foes. Perhaps the greatest wartime short of all was Bob Clampett’s Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, in which America’s relentless energy and implacable will to victory were translated through the medium of black jazz and street culture. Beneath the now repellent stereotypes, Coal Black was the animated equivalent of a B29 fueled by pure adrenaline and laden with the bombs of liberty’s righteousness. Nothing like Coal Black has ever been produced again. Why is that?

One reason is certainly the events that ended “The Good War.” The old modes of armed international conflict were forever buried in the radioactive rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From then on, the possibility that the next war would be the last moved out of the realm of science fiction and into our waking nightmares. Popeye might be able to stop a tank, or Daffy Duck a Nazi goat, but nothing could survive a rain of missiles, any one of which could incinerate hundreds of thousands of people in one swift nuclear flash. The toons were as helpless as we were; just as unprepared to fight such a war, and certainly just as unable to envision the world that would be left following such a conflict. Were anyone still alive to animate Bugs Bunny in the face of such a holocaust, they could only depict that trickster in the midst of a blasted landscape, staring about in shock while radiation seared raw, gaping holes in his pelt. It is difficult to raise up a fighting spirit when a war is in no way winnable, or for that matter, survivable.

Then of course, there was the changing nature of how wars were fought. The Cold War was a shadowy affair, a dark, swirling dance across the face of the globe between two contentious ideologies who dared not pull the nuclear trigger on each other. America and the Soviet Union snarled and swiped at each other in Berlin and Havana, but primarily fought their struggles through third world proxies in obscure locations. Wars were never formally declared, nor could they be carried to the logical conclusion of battering an enemy to the point of surrender. To make the game more confusing, the major combatants indiscriminately tossed arms and treasure to any unsavory dictator or strongman who batted his eyes seductively enough. Our friends were often as despicable as our foes, with nary a Winston Churchill amongst them. Thus was the state of the world at the time of the Korean War.

America’s first armed conflict following WWII was never formally declared, nor was it settled by a signed treaty; it was an exercise in containment policy ostensibly aimed at halting Communist expansion, and it could have ended much worse for American forces than it actually did. This was a hard war to sell to the public, in a place far less identifiable to most Americans than Germany, Italy or Japan. This new style of war was incomprehensible: America was never threatened directly, nor was there any danger of Kim Il Sung dictating peace terms to the White House. Even should North Korea be defeated, nothing would be settled save bragging rights; the might and main of both Communist Russia and China would remain untouched, guaranteeing that a new fire would simply flare up elsewhere. The United States could try to head off such trouble in advance by arranging for a leftist leader to be “deposed” in favor of a more tractable one. In such a dreary, duplicitous struggle neither Bugs, Daffy, Popeye nor Donald had any place, since a national sense of purpose, righteousness and élan had no place either. Today the Korean conflict is euphemistically called “the forgotten war,” and no one forgot it more thoroughly than Hollywood’s animation studios.