"I hope you've
got a sense of humour," advises the writer, director and animator Bill
Plympton, introducing his film "Hitler's Folly." The 67-minute
mockumentary, presenting an alternate history about Adolf Hitler's career as an
animator, has been presented, for free, at www.plymptoons.com since its release
in 2016, because Plympton surmised it was not the sort of film that Hollywood
would wish to make.
However, even this
film recognises that Hollywood already put the boot in to Hitler. When the
director of the "documentary," relating the story provided by a
conspiracy theorist murdered at the beginning of the film, says, "is this
the biggest pile of horse crap you've ever heard," as if you needed
reminding, rationalising its existence with "Mel Brooks did this kind of
thing with 'The Producers,' and he is perfectly fine... to this day, perfectly
fine."
"Springtime for
Hitler" is a complete piss-take that keeps its subject at arm's length,
but "Hitler's Folly" invites you to identify with Hitler from the
start, beginning with how, as a child, the saving an injured duck inspired
Hitler to create "Downy Duck," a cartoon character that would become
the flagship character of Hitlertoons, and the star of a four-hour animated retelling
of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen. The evidence is presented as film
fragments, drawings and photographs kept in a hoarded box by the conspiracy
theorist, but in real life is Plympton's work, aping 1920s and 30s animation
style, particularly Disney, of which Hitler is depicted as a fan, and doctoring
photographs.
When I first heard
about "Hitler's Folly," I thought Plympton would set up Downy Duck as
being part of the Nazi Party’s propaganda campaign. What I was not prepared
for, and what will test what people define as a joke, is how Downy Duck was
Hitler's main plan all along. Hitler is depicted as setting up a film club,
where the Nazi salute was a sign of community, and goose-stepping came from
trying to walk on sticky cinema carpets. This led to the formation of
"NACI," the National Animation Cinema Institute. Hitler then became
Chancellor of Germany in order to secure funding for his Ring Cycle film, the
deal hinging on President Hindenburg securing a drawing of Mickey Mouse from
"Steamboat Willie." The mooted plans for a "Nazi Land,"
making too close a comparison with Disney, was where this film started to lose
me, as the film tests when you will get fed up with it.
The conceit that the
Second World War was to secure the rights to "territories" in which
to release the film was bad enough, but the concentration camps are then
described as artists' communes, where people "concentrated" on their
work, and where people whose work wasn't good enough were taken away. A picture
of the gate into Auschwitz was doctored to read "Arbeit Macht Frei - Ink
& Paint Dept." Somehow, I watched this film to the end.
I guess Bill Plympton
was relying on the absurdity of his tale bringing people through to the end -
that it is so outrageous, it cannot possibly be taken seriously. Much about the
Second World War that can be laughed at, but there remains much that cannot be,
and those boundaries are maintained as a reminder to us all, with good reason.
If "Hitler's Folly" was maintained as just that, a folly on the side,
it would have been more palatable - to joke that a world war was waged to make
a film, "conspiracy theory" or not, will remain in bad taste for a
very long time.
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