Mickey Mouse In Vietnam: The Lost Anti-War Animation from 1968

Disney’s most iconic character, Mickey Mouse, did appear in an animated underground film created by two critics of the war, Lee Savage and the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser.
Produced in 1968 for The Angry Arts Festival, the one minute animation shows Mickey getting lured into fighting in Viet Nam, and then, rather immediately, getting shot in the head. The anti-war commentary gets made brutally and economically. Sometimes less is more.
In a recent interview with Buzzfeed, Glaser recalls: “[O]bviously Mickey Mouse is a symbol of innocence, and of America, and of success, and of idealism — and to have him killed, as a solider is such a contradiction of your expectations. And when you’re dealing with communication, when you contradict expectations, you get a result.”

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