The story Behind the Nazi Animated Sequence

Just wanted to post this again, for anyone who cares about the creation of the Nazi Animated propaganda film seen in The Rocketeer...

From Cinefex Magazine number 48, pages 38 and 40...

"The Nazi animation was shown full screen," stated Johnston, "as if the theater has become Hughes' office . The idea was that the theater audience would be seeing it for the first time just like Cliff and Peevy in the movie. The Nazi animation film was something that was roughly described in the script, but Mark Dindal of Walt Disney animation really designed it and came up with the images."

For Dindal, visual effects supervisor on The Little Mermaid, the Nazi animation sequence offered an intriguing opportunity to play hooky from the demands of house style. "I enjoyed it - subject matter aside - because it was a such a different thing from the usual Disney subject matter. For the movie itself, it was a little treat that added to the whole experience." To design and direct the sequence, Dindal had to immerse himself in the mindset of the period. "Joe wanted it to look like it had been made by the Nazis' own production house. looking through the reference material - which included stills from Nazi propaganda films and posters of the period - left a real impression on me. You can't help but be moved by it. Pictures of the young S.S. officers that looked like knights of old, glorified shots of the Nazi eagle, the huge rallies where Hitler would be in front of the columns draped with giant Nazi flags. It's creepy in retrospect, knowing what it was they were up to, but doing it was intriguing in the same way playing a villain is intriguing to some actors."

The animation was inspired by the animated 'Superman' series begun in 1941 by Fleischer studios and distributed by Paramount. The Fleischer 'Superman' cartoons - considered landmarks in animation history - featured strong, realistic figures, many rendered by rotoscoping and shading for three dimensional effect. The stories used exaggerated perspectives and a noir atmosphere to create an eerie mood - elements similar to the direct, stylized look of the Nazi propaganda films.

Once Dindal designed the storyboards and art direction - based on an initial series of boards supplied by Joe Johnston - the animation production phase began. Cartoon animation, despite the development of digital cartoon work, is still largely hand drawn, the production process virtually unchanged since 1913 when animator Raoul Barre opened the first professional animation studio and pioneered the peg system to hold each page in register. Even for a short piece, the six to eight hundred animation cells required for the Nazi film was small compared to many animation projects, due largely to the stylized art design. "The visual images themselves, as far as concentrating on the things that count, represented a rather abridged approach to what we usually do on the traditional Disney animated feature," observed Dindal. "We didn't need the visual richness of a Pinocchio. Nazi propaganda films have a very definite artistic style. Like the Fleischer cartoons, there's a little less to look at, but the strength is where it needs to be. The composition directs the viewer's eye to the focal point of whatever the scene might be. Although I drew all of the animated elements, I had the help of two assistants, Dab Chaika and Steve Starr. James Beihold was a layout artist who drew the backgrounds, and Phil Phillipson was a background artist who painted that material. There was also about a dozen people in postproduction. The actual production entailed taking the animation paper drawings and xeroxing them onto cell material. The color - or, in this case, shades of gray - was painted on the back of those cells.Each cell was then laid down, one at a time, on registration pegs and photographed over a painted background."

Some of the drawings were put into motion through tricks of the animation process. "The POV shots of the Nazis flying over a bombed-out city was a single drawing that the camera just panned over to give the illusion of motion, much in the way a motion control camera pass makes a spaceship seem to move. Their rocket packs had a double exposure of the flame effect to make it look like the packs were firing. Another interesting effect was the scene where the flames consume the American eagle and transform it into the German eagle. The flames were traditional animation; but there were seven paintings of the two eagles, and I just cross-dissolved between them to give the appearance of the American eagle transforming into the German eagle. We also put a rippled plexiglass distortion plate between the camera and the artwork to simulate the heat from the flames."

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Whose idea was it for the word "Lisp" to have an "S" in it?