We watched the second disk of the "Walt Disney on the Front Lines" set last night; this was the disk that Victory Through Air Power was on. Of course James had always wanted to see it, especially having read Seversky's book. I'd read the description in Leonard Maltin's The Disney Films and was intrigued with it, especially after I saw some of the animation in Disney tribute shows and in Life Goes to War.

It's actually a cool movie, if you're into history--especially if you like aviation as James does--and know it's not your typical Disney animated film. The opening animation, which is the story of aviation up to 1943, is amusing at times. The rest of the graphics and animation illustrated Seversky's theories of long-range bombing. The design is quite stunning in places and the restoration of the film shows it all off to good advantage.

The rest of the disk has two interviews with Disney animators who were working during the war, and another with Roy Disney's memories of the studio during wartime (he was eleven when Pearl Harbor was bombed), galleries of animation art and storyboards (including the abandoned feature about "the Gremlins" based on the Roald Dahl book) and insignia that Disney did for various military units, plus two Disney wartime traing shorts.

These seem to have been divided up into two types of films: ones that used the occasional cartoon interspersed with the training instructions for humor--this was the type used in the anti-tank rifle training film included, which opened with a cartoon about Hitler going to Hell and included little humorous asides, although the majority of the film was about the rifle itself: how it worked (illustrated with animation), how to clean it, how to fire it in different situations--or ones that were simply straighforward training films illustrated with nonhumorous, illustrative animation. That was the other entire training film shown, "Four Methods of Flush Riveting." It was, as you might expect, a bit dull for anyone who's not learning flush riveting, but a good example of how simple the Disney training films made the process, with clear illustrations and instructions.

There's also a short with different clips of other training films; some were for aviation identification and weather training that James wished he could have seen in their entirety.

By the way, the four methods of flush riveting are "countersinking," "dimpling," "double dimpling," and a combined "dimpling" and "countersinking" technique, depending on the thickness of the two pieces of metal being riveted together. :-) So now you know!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 12:21:00 PM

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