In Hollywood last summer Walt Disney, restless creator of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and many another cinanimal, was playing mental tiddlywinks with the idea of putting together a monthly animated-cartoon digest, roughly analogous in the motion-picture field to the spectacularly successful Reader's Digest.
Digging for suggestions, he browsed through a copy of the Digest, came upon a condensation of Victory Through Air Power, the brash, controversial best-seller dashed off by Major Alexander P. ("Sascha") de Seversky to advertise his passionate belief that the war can best be won by bombing planes of unprecedented size and range, wielded by an independent air command.
The cartoon digest notion never got out of swaddling clothes, but Disney's imagination had been kindled by Seversky's vivid word pictures of what air war could, and would, be like in the immediate future. He arranged a meeting with Sascha, and the two men set to work to translate the book into film. The resulting Disney-Seversky Victory Through Air Power will open in New York next week, then be distributed nationally by United Artists.
As it stands, the picture is 65 minutes of highly unorthodox film fare, and an exceedingly potent instrument of propaganda for untrammeled (and not yet existent) air power. It may drop with the effect of an incendiary bomb into the long-smoldering argument on whether the U.S. should have a separate Air Force, ranking with the Army and Navy and independent of their control.
Just what U.S. military authorities thought of the project was impossible to learn. Hollywood rumors, sifted down, indicated that Disney had received some politely unofficial suggestions that the book really wasn't good picture material. Apparently no stronger pressure was applied. Disney, at any rate, did not produce the picture in a military vacuum; his studio's main job now is turning out war training films, and he has ample contact with the armed forces.
Disney Technique. Movie audiences will see in Victory an odd blending of 1) pure Disney cartoon fun, 2) the action, draughtsmanship and color of his feature-length films, 3) superbly contrived maps and animated diagrams, 4) perhaps too much of Seversky in a handsome office, driving home his arguments.
After a brief dedication to the late Brigadier General "Billy" Mitchell, evangelist and martyr of the air-power cause (who would have given his right arm for a movie like Victory to carry his message to the people), the film swings into a lighthearted cartoon history of aviation, starting in 1903 with the Wright Brothers' first powered flight (12 seconds; 120 ft.).