During WWII, Walt Disney Studios devoted itself almost entirely to producing animated and live-action shorts to aid the Allied war effort. No studio, in fact, devoted more time and energy to wartime activity than Disney. Rarely seen in the decades since, these films are some of the most interesting and brilliantly visualized in Disney's history. Thanks to Walt Disney Home Video's new release Walt Disney Treasures: On the Front Lines, over two dozen of the shorts are now available for home viewing, along with the famous feature Victory Through Air Power, which has never been re-released since it came out in 1943.

Broken down, the two-disc set includes 15 propaganda cartoon shorts, 14 educational shorts, 2 training films (along with a montage of others), and on a separate disc, Victory Through Air Power. Many of the cartoons feature Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and Mickey Mouse in wartime situations, be they getting drafted, undertaking army missions, buying war bonds, or suffering under Nazi dictatorship.

While they were made primarily to educate and enlighten Americans about the war effort and to suggest ways that the average American could help, Walt Disney and his artists also obviously understood the importance of entertainment value - not just to help the message go down easier but to give the public some much-needed laughs. Moviegoing was at an all-time high in the early 1940s, and these films commanded a remarkable power to influence and entertain.

And so the public was treated to Donald Duck reporting to a draft office, Goofy coping with the rubber and gas shortage, Donald sent on a suicide mission to wipe out a Japanese air base, and the seven dwarfs buying war bonds in one short and dealing with malaria-spreading mosquitoes in another. Even Pinocchio, Gepetto and the three little pigs are resurrected for some educational cartoons.

Other films in this set include several commissioned by U.S. government agencies. For example, the Treasury Dept. wanted a film which would inspire Americans to pay their taxes on time. The result was "The New Spirit" (1942) starring Donald Duck, which worked so well that a follow-up, "The Spirit of '43," was made. Another short, "Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire" (1942) was commissioned by the Conservation Division of the War Production Board, and is all about the importance of saving kitchen grease for munitions production! It's one of the most entertaining in the set. So is "Reason and Emotion" (1943), a hilarious take on the importance of reason and emotion working together in every human brain, and the way that relationship is warped by the Nazis. The most infamous wartime Disney cartoon may be "Der Fuehrer's Face" (1943), which finds Donald working on a Nazi assembly line and hurling a tomato at Hitler's face.

The shorts overall are full of expressive, imaginative visuals, and it's fascinating to see how the talented animation artists of the time devoted their skills to such serious, and sometimes grim, subjects. The propaganda cartoons "Chicken Little" (1943) and "Education for Death" (1943) are cases in point and stand out as perhaps two of the grimmest cartoons ever produced in Hollywood. The latter is also one of the most beautifully animated of all the Disney shorts. Many of the 200 training films that Disney produced during the war were only recently declassified; two are shown here, along with a montage of some of the others.

Disc 2 contains the first DVD appearance of Victory Through Air Power (1943), a combination of animation and live-action which Leonard Maltin rightfully calls in his intro "the most unusual feature film Walt Disney ever made." The picture is based on an influential book of the time by Major Alex de Seversky which argued that long-range bombers were the key to winning the war. The Technicolor film was the result of Walt Disney's personal patriotism and investment in the subject. When his usual distributor, RKO, turned the project down because of its limited commercial prospects, Disney turned to United Artists instead. RKO turned out to be right - the movie didn't do well commercially - but Disney felt satisfied when he found out that Winston Churchill himself insisted that Franklin Roosevelt see the film; after watching it, the story goes, FDR did indeed commit to the expansion of the air force.

Also on the DVD is rare footage of the making of Victory Through Air Power along with production art, poster galleries, and filmed interviews with Roy Disney, story man Joe Grant, and animation artist John Hench. Leonard Maltin provides lean, interesting introductions and comments throughout, providing helpful contexts for everything, and the DVDs themselves are beautifully presented in metal boxes with attractive liner notes and menu designs. It's a class act of presenting a fascinating portal to another time in American - and Hollywood - history.

To order Walt Disney Treasures, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold