You might know Win­sor McCay (1867? ‑1934) for the gor­geous­ly sur­re­al Lit­tle Nemo com­ic strip or for his ear­ly ani­mat­ed short Ger­tie the Dinosaur (1914). But did you know that he also cre­at­ed some of the ear­li­est exam­ples of ani­mat­ed pro­pa­gan­da ever?

On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusi­ta­nia was just off the coast of Ire­land, head­ing towards its des­ti­na­tion of Liv­er­pool, when a Ger­man U‑boat attacked the ship with­out warn­ing. Eigh­teen min­utes after two tor­pe­does slammed into the ship, it was under water. 1,198 died. The furor over the inci­dent even­tu­al­ly led to the Unit­ed States enter­ing WWI.

At the time of the sink­ing, McCay was employed by William Ran­dolph Hearst as an edi­to­r­i­al car­toon­ist. Though McCay was incensed by the attack, Hearst was an iso­la­tion­ist and demand­ed that he draw anti-war car­toons. This grat­ed on the artist more and more until final­ly he decid­ed to fol­low up on his huge­ly suc­cess­ful Ger­tie the Dinosaur by mak­ing The Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia (1918), which you can see above.

The movie took two years of painstak­ing effort to make and con­sist­ed of over 25,000 drawings—all done by hand and most done by McCay him­self dur­ing his free time after work.

Com­pared to oth­er ani­ma­tion done around this time, the film is both stark and seri­ous, lend­ing it the air of a doc­u­men­tary. The piece, which isn’t much short­er than the actu­al time it took for the Lusi­ta­nia to sink, gives a blow-by-blow account of the attack. Though the inci­dent is depict­ed large­ly from afar, as if from a cam­era on anoth­er ship, McCay doesn’t shy away from show­ing some real­ly gut-wrench­ing moments of the tragedy up close. At one point, there is a shot of a des­per­ate moth­er try­ing to keep her baby above the waves. At anoth­er point, dozens of peo­ple are seen bob­bing in the chop­py seas like drift­wood.

And, just in case you haven’t quite grasped the thrust of the film, McCay includes some inter­ti­tles, which are, even by the stan­dards of war pro­pa­gan­da, pret­ty heavy-hand­ed.

The babe that clung to his mother’s breast cried out to the world – TO AVENGE the most vio­lent cru­el­ty that was ever per­pe­trat­ed upon an unsus­pect­ing and inno­cent peo­ple.

And

The man who fired the shot was dec­o­rat­ed for it by the Kaiser! – AND YET THEY TELL US NOT TO HATE THE HUN.

The curi­ous thing about the movie, con­sid­er­ing its sub­ject mat­ter, is how beau­ti­ful it is. Just look at the styl­ized lines of the ocean, the baroque arabesques of the smoke com­ing off the ship’s smoke­stacks, the ele­gant use of neg­a­tive space. Each and every cel of the movie is wor­thy of get­ting framed. How many war pro­pa­gan­da movies can you say that about?

You can find The Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia Ani­mat­ed in Real Time (1915)

Watch Win­sor McCay’s Lit­tle Nemo and Ger­tie the Dinosaur, and Wit­ness the Birth of Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion (1911–1914)

How Dis­ney Fought Fas­cism with Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons Dur­ing World War II & Avert­ed Finan­cial Col­lapse

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

Today, the Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny seems like one of those enti­ties that’s “too big to fail” — but dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, fail it near­ly did. Like the big-think­ing enter­tain­er-busi­ness­man he was, Walt Dis­ney him­self had been re-invest­ing the com­pa­ny’s prof­its into ever more ambi­tious ani­mat­ed films. This prac­tice took an unfor­tu­nate turn with Fan­ta­sia, which may now be regard­ed as a clas­sic even by those of us with­out inter­est in Dis­ney movies, but which did­n’t bring in the expect­ed box-office take when it was ini­tial­ly released in 1940. It fol­lowed the also-under­per­form­ing Pinoc­chio, which could­n’t reach audi­ences in war-torn Europe. The fol­low­ing year, Dis­ney found itself at the edge of bank­rupt­cy.

Then came the Japan­ese attack on Pearl Har­bor, which result­ed in the U.S. Army’s eight-month-long occu­pa­tion of Walt Dis­ney Stu­dios. The idea was to pro­tect a near­by Lock­heed plant, but Dis­ney, who’d already made inquiries about pro­duc­ing war films, used an oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a deal that saved his com­pa­ny.

Walt Dis­ney Stu­dios was con­tract­ed to make not just a vari­ety of train­ing films for mil­i­tary use, but also a series of war-themed car­toons for pub­lic exhi­bi­tion. This was “total war,” after all, which required the mobi­liza­tion of the pub­lic at home, and the mobi­liza­tion of the pub­lic at home required domes­tic pro­pa­gan­da. Who bet­ter to stoke Amer­i­can desire for vic­to­ry over the Axis than Dis­ney’s biggest ani­mat­ed star at the time, Don­ald Duck?

In the most acclaimed of these car­toons, the Acad­e­my Award-win­ning Der Fuehrer’s Face from 1943, Don­ald Duck is employed at a muni­tions fac­to­ry in Nutzi­land, some kind of Axis super­state ruled over by Hiro­hi­to, Mus­soli­ni, and espe­cial­ly Hitler. It’s some­thing else to hear the phrase “Heil Hitler!” in Don­ald Duck­’s voice, and through­out his day of humil­i­a­tions and pri­va­tions in Nutzi­land, he has to say it quite a lot. Just when all of this has put him in a tail­spin toward mad­ness, he wakes up in his bed­room back in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, stars-and-stripes cur­tains, minia­ture Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, and all. For Don­ald, the night­mare is over — but in real life, Allied vic­to­ry remained far from a sure thing.

You can watch Der Fuehrer’s Face and sev­en oth­er Dis­ney-pro­duced World War II pro­pa­gan­da car­toons (along with the Looney Tunes short The Duck­ta­tors, from Warn­er Bros.) in the playlist above. To be sure, some of them con­tain ele­ments con­sid­ered crude and even offen­sive here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. But like all pro­pa­gan­da, they’re all of great his­tor­i­cal val­ue, in the realm of both polit­i­cal his­to­ry and the his­to­ry of ani­ma­tion. Con­sid­er how they found their way into Europe and Rus­sia, find­ing audi­ences there even as the war raged on; con­sid­er, too, how well-loved Don­ald Duck and his com­pa­tri­ots have been by gen­er­a­tions of Ger­man, Ital­ian, and Japan­ese chil­dren. After this total war, no one enjoyed more total a vic­to­ry than Dis­ney.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of the Nazi – Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fas­cists Are Made

Neu­ro­science and Pro­pa­gan­da Come Togeth­er in Disney’s World War II Film Rea­son and Emo­tion

Before Cre­at­ing the Moomins, Tove Jans­son Drew Satir­i­cal Art Mock­ing Hitler & Stal­in

Pri­vate Sna­fu: The World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons Cre­at­ed by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel

“Evil Mick­ey Mouse” Invades Japan in a 1934 Japan­ese Ani­me Pro­pa­gan­da Film

“The Duck­ta­tors”: Loony Tunes Turns Ani­ma­tion into Wartime Pro­pa­gan­da (1942)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.