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Fascism and Family Entertainment

Since the late eighties, children’s animation films have been fused more explicitly than ever before into family entertainment. Video stores offer sections with “family features;” Disney and Dream Works, the two large competing dream factories of American animation, advertise their features as “family fun” (McDonnell 65–67). To appeal to children, these films rely on traditional fairy-tale narrative combined with slapstick humor and appealing animal characters. To keep adults interested, they offer sophisticated musical tunes and witty pop culture references and the newest special effects. Kids’ films, in other words, to be successful as family entertainment, need to cater to different audiences with different narrative and visual expectations. In order to infuse children’s film with adult appeal, most movies now feature a drawn-out romantic love story, sexual tension, intense drama, and a raised level of violence that has long surpassed the violent death of Bambi’s mother so traumatic to my generation. Children’s movies have, in the last decade, also borrowed more freely from history, played with ideologies, raided politically charged images for their effects and thereby conferred to kids’ features a level of unmatched evil. With the intent to entertain the adults in the family, filmmakers incorporate Nazism as one of many historical-ideological markers in children’s animated movies. For a long time, Nazism has posed as Hollywood’s most beloved villain. Long, black leather boots, a well-cut Nazi uniform, a German accent, and fascist architecture have energized and sexualized the worn plots of Hollywood films and their primal conflict between good and evil. As the usage of fascist iconography increases, contemporary films engage less and less with the historical period of fascism. In features such as Apt Pupil (1998) or The Cell (2000), fascism’s paraphernalia and regalia, its sights and sounds douse a conventional plot in spine-chilling suspense. In fact, apart from the ever-popular historical-monumental epics about the Third Reich as our past (Schindler’s List (1993), The Pianist (2002)), the films that evoke fascism most often and most spectacularly are films (such as Star Wars (1977–83), Gattaca (1997), Hellboy (2004)), that exploit the performative aspects of Nazism, its iconography and its plasticity as emblematic evil. It has rarely been considered, however, in which way and to what end fascist elements function as entertainment in recent animated family films. Three recent animation features, the popular drama the Lion King (1995), the fully computer animated Antz (1998) and the comedy Chicken Run (2000) all had huge success at the box office. All three films tap into National Socialism as a rich cultural resource and feature, to varying degrees and in varying functions, fascist elements and fascist imagery that will most certainly not be recognized as such by children, yet appeal to the