Going a little out of release order here, but that's okay. First shot of animation: A book titled "History of Aviation" opening, echoing the storybooks of the fairytale movies
This explicit propaganda movie doesn't get talked about much. Wonder why that is. And it's propaganda aimed at the government, and getting the public to pressure the government. It's Waiting for Superman but for long-range bombers, and mostly a cartoon.
The narration is meant to be received as plain facts, but the persuasive intent is ever-present. All the basic techniques are here. Frankly I was expecting more ethnic caricature, it was 1942 after all, but that isn't really a part of it. No Japanese person is featured, only weapons and maps and flags.
All the animation is done in the same visual style and narrator voice as the Goofy "How to" cartoons and it's really disorienting. The History of Aviation segment even has some gags, but I'm expecting full-on slapstick at any moment. Narrator re: the first flight over the English Channel, "England was no longer separated from the rest of Europe by an impassable body of water". Yeah, sure, ask the Vikings about that.
It's followed by a long resume for our expert, Alexander de Seversky, a Russian aviator who defected following the Revolution and has a genuinely impressive list of accomplishments. His first point is that the invention of air power means fronts are meaningless, and every citizen must be aware of the strategy of war. This film is terrifying.
Next segment is on the effectiveness of Nazi and Japanese short-range aviation strategy. The German WW1 pilot, and his French counterpart, were buffoons in the History of Aviation segment, but every Nazi is dangerous and evil. DUNKIRK is written in letters made of mile-high flames. Spitfires are dangerous and heroic.
The next segment, on how mirroring the short-range strategy is doomed to fail, is the longest one because it makes the most nuanced argument. The idea is that beating the enemy at their own game requires outproducing them, and getting that production to the battlefield, to squeeze them tighter, which makes their resupply faster and our slower, and also there's U-Boats ("The deadliest weapon of them all" after almost an hour of talking up the airplane). It's a lot of moving parts, simplified with visual metaphors and the US drawn as one giant factory. So forget a costly ground war to seize nearby airfields, make planes that can hit their factories from the other side of the world. This dude hates island-hopping so much.
Next, a description of what long-range airpower could be capable of; like bombs that collapse dams and flood entire cities, bombs that dive beneath the earth and cause earthquakes, and a rocket-propelled bomb that predicts the Bunker Buster. This film is terrifying.
Seversky tells us the need for long-range air power is "a question of who destroys who first" and urges Roosevelt to "forge the dagger that can strike at the heart of the beast". There's been a lot of "beast" talk as the segments go by. A gradual slide into more and more emotional urgency. The last scene has the narration entirely fall away as an American Eagle fights a Pacific-spanning octopus. Every strike causes a tentacle to drop the knife stabbed into another island. The victorious eagle flies to a perch where it becomes a golden figure, and the perch turns out to be a flagpole. Yeah who could say why this one doesn't make the big, official lists.
