Momatoro’s Divine Sea Warriors

orld War Two was fought with everything on hand – fleets and tanks and bayonets and kamikaze Zeros, yes, but cartoons, too, dedicated to winning the hearts and minds of the coming generation to whatever Great Struggle was being proposed. In , for instance, the famous Warner Bros duck drops into Deutschland to doink a rotoscoped, Mel Blanc-voiced Hitler over the noggin with a mallet, while Popeye the Sailor can be seen sending an entire Japanese battleship to the salvage yard singlehanded in . Even ’toons lacking in explicitly political content could send a message: Yasujiro Ozu, stationed in Singapore and screening contraband prints of captured Hollywood movies while in the employ of the censorship board, was gobsmacked by his first viewing of a made me suspect that we were going to lose the war,” he said. “Those guys look like trouble, I thought.”