‘Mickey Mouse in Vietnam’: the most disturbing anti-war cartoon
Anyone with a passing knowledge of animation history knows that the Disney icon himself, Mickey Mouse, pops up in the most unexpected places.
A sky-high, unprecedented cameo in Robert Zemeckis’ masterpiece, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Battling Sephiroth and other Final Fantasy villains, Sora by his side in the interminable, yet delightful Kingdom Hearts series. There are countless other examples of Ol’ Mickey showing up in the most unexpected places, but then you get the other side of the coin. Where parody and fair use clauses allow the mascot of one of the world’s most powerful corporations to get a little weird with it.
Probably the most famous example of this is the times that the world’s most famous Mouse (sorry, Minnie) shows up as a domineering, cigar-chewing executive in South Park. All par for the course in the world of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it’s something we recognise as doing something bad. Hack-frauds do hack-fraud shit, what else is new. If you really want to see something shocking starring Mickey Mouse, look no further than 1969 and a short film called Mickey Mouse in Vietnam.
Now, there’s a universe in which this isn’t an unauthorised, unlicensed short. After all, we’ve all seen those Disney-produced propaganda clips made in the 1940s showing Donald Duck assembling weapons for the Third Reich. Christ, when put like that, it’s truly bizarre that they exist, right? The point is, they were fully fledged Disney productions supporting the war effort and putting pressure on the American government to go and show the Nazis what for.
This is not that, and not just because Disney didn’t put their seal of approval on it.
What happens in Mickey Mouse in Vietnam?
Drawn in stark black and white with a shaky, abrasive style of animation, Mickey Mouse in Vietnam right off the bat doesn’t feel like a traditional Mickey Mouse cartoon with a budget the size of a small country thrown at getting the branding of Disney’s most marketable character juuuuust right. No, this short feels like exactly what it is. A collaboration between two key creative minds and the work of a very independent studio, fleshing it out.
The director was Whitney Lee Savage (the father of Mythbusters’ Adam, fun fact!). The producer was the famed graphic designer and the man behind the I <3 NY logo, Milton Glaser. The story is very simple. Mickey Mouse spots a US Army recruitment ad to “Join the Army and see the world”. The poor mouse is hooked and signs up on the spot. He eagerly travels by boat to Vietnam, sporting a rifle and a helmet, but literally the moment he steps off the boat, he’d shot in the head, bleeding out inches from the very boat that delivered him there.
This illustrates the key difference between World War II and Vietnam. People thought the US Army should be fighting in Europe back in the early 1940s, even powerful people in the Walt Disney Company. Absolutely no one thought that Vietnam was a war worth fighting outside of the US government. Savage and Glaser were like most normal people in the US at the time, who saw the conflict as nothing more than a way of culling young people.
Thus, they picked the ultimate symbol of innocence to be brutally murdered by it in a work of anti-war animation, truly disturbing in its simplicity.