Strong and Moving!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

It spells out the moral message in an entertaining and sometimes amusing way, with just about the right balance.The narrative follows the path of little Hans, born to a sympathetically drawn normal German family whose Aryan ancestry the state has validated.In school the children are told a story about a fox chasing and eating a rabbit. And the uniformed teacher with the massive jaw and gravelly voice asks what they think of the characters in the fairy tale. Hans opts for feeling sorry for the poor hare. He's excoriated and sent to the corner until eventually he yields to pressure from his peers and his authority figures and becomes a true Nazi, "educated for death."The scenes are vivid and clever. There are sly hints of The Ride of the Valkyries from Wagner. The caricatured portraits of Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels are funny as hell, as well done as anything by any current political cartoonist.And the narration is perfectly correct in arguing that learning begins at birth -- not just in Nazi Germany but everywhere. That's why our boy babies wear blue and girl babies wear pink.

This is a short film I show in my classes, not to explain how Hitler made good his boast that it needn't matter if people crossed over to join his movement as their children already belonged to him, but using a contemporary source to analyse its origin, purpose, value and limitations. Unlike what other commentators here have stated, the cartoon does not show all Germans as evil, but how they have to be moulded to follow the Nazi ideology. My main issue that I would ask you to look at whilst watching it is the complete omission of anything to do with the Jews. The fear the British and (more so given they were not directly attacked by Germany) American Governments did not want its people to think they were fighting for Jews. But here no mention is made of Reichskristallnacht or the clear systematic persecution of Jews that had been covered in world newspapers since Hitler's assumption of power in 1933. Synagogues have been replaced with churches, toras with Bibles, stars of David with crucifixes. Whilst understandable given the mentality at the time it was made, it is glaring and a bit concerning that none has apparently seen fit to make this connection here. www.tracesofevil.blogspot.com

Like many other animations from the 40s, this is a true reflection of what seems to be a lost art of deco animation. I love the time period, and its a shame that many of today's animations, or cartoons, don't seem to have the heart that these old cartoons did. As far as the content, yes it's evil, yes it's Nazi, blah blah, and no, I'm not as shocked as many who view this seem to be. Frankly, I get tired of the automated, conditioned response we're taught to have in this country. "The holocaust was bad." "Nazism was evil." "The terrorists we're Saudis" "Liberals hate America" "Republicans are Jesus freaks" It's all the same crap, do you let people think for you? If this we're truly Armageddon, then you'd be f_cked, as would most Americans, because they would be waiting for someone to tell them what to do, and how to think.

Short animation flick follows the early years of 'Hans', who has the bad luck of being born in Hitler Germany. He's brainwashed into becoming a nazi, and ultimately dies at the battlefield, as thousands of his fellow Germans did.With first viewing you think Disney's thought on nazi-Germany (which is portrayed as a fat, ugly and gullible woman) is a bit too simplistic and one-dimensional, but in the end, when you think of it, it's more of a sad story about the young kid than one of hatred towards the nazi's.The animations are amazing and the content (with what we know how) grim, dark and scary. Hard to rate this, but I'll give it a 7/10. Be sure to catch this if you can.