If Saludos Amigos (1943) had seen Walt Disney – the company and the man – dipping their toes into the political waters (it had been made after Disney had been approached by the Department of State to help out with the Good Neighbor Policy, the US government fearing that some South American countries had links to or sympathies with Nazi Germany) then Victory Through Air Power was a full, head-first dive into propaganda. It’s the very epitome of “a product of its time,” a film made with a very specific purpose that no longer means much and the film today is a historical oddity.

Partly animated, partly live-action, it’s based on the book of the same name by Alexander P. de Seversky, a Russian American aviation pioneer, at the time a Major in the Army Air Corps Reserve and founder and owner of the Seversky Aircraft Corporation. Both book and film are heart-felt pleas for the US government to promote air power as the decisive weapon in World War II. De Seversky appears on screen throughout, arguing his case while the Disney animators portray many of his concepts in limited but effective animation. The first 20 or so of its 70 minutes are a gorgeously drawn if rather potted history of manned flight followed by an equally whistle-stop tour of the war in Europe so far, focussing on Germany’s use of its air force and the subsequent bloody nose dealt it during the Battle of Britain before the war in the east takes centre stage. The rest is de Seversky issuing dire warnings and urging America to embrace the aircraft as the best hope they had for victory.

There’s no denying the technical brilliance of the animation, but it’s all a bit dull, a bit too shrill and hectoring. Of course, it was never intended to be simply an entertainment for mass consumption, but rather a call to arms, a wake-up call for anyone willing to listen. But as with so many films of its ilk, it soon starts to feel we’re being beaten repeatedly with the same message – subtle it most certainly isn’t.

But it certainly did the trick – Disney arranged for American and British leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to see the film while they were attending the August 1943 Quebec Conference and Roosevelt was convinced of Seversky’s argument and stepped up the long-range bombing campaign that was already underway. Churchill was impressed enough by the sequence showing a rocket bomb penetrating the thick concrete protecting U-boat pens that the British ended up with a weapon just like it, nicknamed the “Disney bomb” by RAF pilots.

Disney took the film very seriously – it doesn’t feature any of its stable of regular comic characters – and it’s consequently a more realistic and much darker film than we were used to from the company. The nightmarish visions of the war, equally disturbing imaginings of the future of military aviation and a weird climactic symbolic battle between eagle and octopus may not be as traumatising as the death of Bambi’s mother but they’re very odd moments that still look very strange in Disney’s otherwise more light-hearted animated filmography.

Today the film looks dated and is rather wearying. The relentless hectoring and splashes of patriotism seem an odd fit for the Disney house-style, but the company was going through a rough patch at the time – its lucrative European markets were closed due to the war, many of its younger animators had been conscripted and a lot of their now-feted feature films hadn’t made as much money as they had hoped. Taking on educational films like Victory Through War Power would prove to be something of a financial lifeline for Disney. These included many short films for military training purposes and had already inducted Donald Duck into the army in Donald Gets Drafted (1942) and him against the Nazis in Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943).

Today the film is an oddity, a little bit of history that doesn’t really mean much anymore but which, in the right context, is a fascinating glimpse of the thinking in the Disney board room during the war. It remains the most overt piece of propaganda that Disney made available to the general public, and it exists in two different versions, a colour version that Disney doesn’t make available on Disney+ due to the grim scenes of warfare, and a black and white and slightly longer version made available to crew of Air Force bases. It was originally released to the American public through United Artists, the first Disney feature not released by either Disney themselves or RKO.