"Heil Hitler!" said the Nazi officer to a distraught mother caring for her gravely ill child.
Along with Night on Bald Mountain and The Mad Doctor, this is easily one of Disney's most chilling and powerful works.- The Nazi officials that Hans's parents interact with are always framed in the shadows and towering over the common people. Sometimes, you can see their mouths or their eyes but never both at the same time. This makes them less like human beings and more like demons in human form.
- While any parent would wish their child to recover from an illness, Hans's mother is literally praying for her son to be well since if the illness doesn't kill him, the Nazis that rule her and the rest of her people will. Surely enough, a Nazi officer pounds on the door and tells her that if this illness continues, he will take Hans away to a concentration camp (where he'll be euthanized like all the other "unfit" people). And Hans's family is just one of millions living under this fear.
- On a more mundane level, Hans finds himself bullied and ostracized by his classmates and the teacher for showing a trace of humanity to the rabbit.
- The caricatures of Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels on the photos. Especially when they give the Death Glare at Hans for showing sympathy to the rabbit.
- The end monologue about how the once-sweet children of Germany are now brainwashed into brutal, heartless monsters who only do, say, and believe in what the Nazis do, say, and believe, illustrated by Hans marching in lockstep with all the other Nazi soldiers, having blinders put on him, then a muzzle like a dog, and then finally a spiked collar with a chain.Marching and heiling, heiling and marching, Hans grows up. In him is planted no seed of laughter, hope, tolerance or mercy. For him only heiling and marching, marching and heiling as the years grind on. Manhood finds him still heiling and marching, but the grim years of regimentation have done their work. Now he is a good Nazi. He sees no more than what the Party wants him to. He says no more than what the Party wants him to say. And he does nothing but what the Party wants him to do. And so he marches on, with his millions of comrades, trampling on the rights of others.
- And then the ending, where the long lines of marching soldiers are replaced by white crosses marked with swastikas.For now, his education is complete. His education...for death.
- Especially how the Disney animators had done to view these things.
- And then the ending, where the long lines of marching soldiers are replaced by white crosses marked with swastikas.
- The simple fact this film was based on reality. Other Disney villains are scary, but at the end of the day, they're just fictional. Evil witches that can make poison apples and transform into giant dragons, and mountain demons don't exist, so there's no reason to be afraid of them except in nightmares. Nazis? They were and at the time of the film are very much real. And more broadly, groups of people who hate and want to kill different groups of people just for existing will always be real (with Claude Frollo being one of the very first Disney villains to remind us of this fact many years later). Humans are the real Disney villains indeed.
- There's also the fact that the Nazi regime was even worse in Real Life than as depicted in the movie, which makes no explicit mention of their antisemitism and their genocidal hatred towards all groups of undesirables. The closest we get are some small-coded hints such as Jewish names being on a list of forbidden names for German children. And in 1945, just two years after the short was released, the Nazi regime resorted to using their own Hitler Youth as Child Soldiers as the Allies poured into Germany. This, combined with the fact that Hans would have been twelve at the oldest in 1945 to be born under Nazism, paints an even darker picture of his fate...
