Victory Through Air Power | |
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Theatrical release poster
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Directed by |
Perce Pearce Animated sequences: James Algar Clyde Geronimi Jack Kinney de Seversky scenes: H.C. Potter |
Produced by | Walt Disney |
Written by |
Story direction: Perce Pearce Story adaptation: T. Hee Erdman Penner William Cottrell James Brodero George Stallings Jose Rodriguez |
Based on | Victory Through Air Power by Maj. Alexander P. Seversky |
Starring | Alexander de Seversky |
Narrated by | Art Baker |
Music by |
Edward H. Plumb Paul J. Smith Oliver Wallace |
Cinematography | Ray Rennahan |
Edited by | Jack Dennis |
Production
company |
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Distributed by | United Artists |
Release date
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Running time
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70 min. |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $788,000 |
Box office | $799,000 |
Victory Through Air Power is a 1943 American Technicolor animated documentary feature film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by United Artists on July 17, 1943. It is based on the 1942 book Victory Through Air Power by Alexander P. de Seversky. De Seversky appeared in the film, an unusual departure from the Disney animated feature films of the time.
Edward H. Plumb, Paul J. Smith and Oliver Wallace were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.
Popular filmmaker Walt Disney read Victory through Air Power and felt that its message was so important that he personally financed the animated production of 'the book. The film was primarily created to express Seversky’s theories to government officials and the public. Movie critic Richard Schickel says that Disney "pushed the film out in a hurry, even setting aside his distrust of limited animation under the impulses of urgency." (The only obvious use of limited animation, however, is in diagrammatic illustrations of Seversky's talking points. These illustrations featured continuous flowing streams of iconic aircraft, forming bridges or shields, and munitions flowing along assembly lines.) It was not until 1945 Disney was able to pay off his $1.2 million war film deficit. After Disney's main distributor at the time RKO Radio Pictures refused to release the film in theaters, Walt decided to have United Artists (the distributor of many of his shorts between 1932 and 1937) release it instead, making it the first and only Disney animated feature to be released by a different movie studio.
On July 11, 1943, the New York Times devoted a half page, "Victory from the Air," to a feature consisting of pictures of scenes from the film with short captions. This was possibly the first time that such skilled use of visual description had been placed at the service of an abstract political argument.