Wow.

Besides my interest in Disney, I have interviewed 50 or so WW II veterans, capturing not only their memories of the war, but also what it was like to grow-up during the Great Depression.

Some of the more powerful interviews have included a USS Arizona Pearl Harbor survivor; a recon platoon Sgt. who went behind German lines to help arrest #2 Nazi Herman Goering one week before the war officially ended; a crash rescue boat crewman who participated in the landings at Iwo Jima and whose job it was to fish the bodies of young, dead, Marines out of the water; a Canadian Typhoon pilot who flew 96 air to ground support missions starting with D-Day+4 to the Battle of the Bulge, Operation Market Garden and the crossing of the Rhine River; a B-17 bombardier who was shot down over Italy and later helped plan the so-called Great Escape from German POW camp Stalag Luft III; Rangers who landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, plus many others.

Their stories, much like this one, are riveting…powerful…and sad…

What a great cartoon. I love that the medium can be so effectively used for serious cultural expression as well as humor

Amazing.

This film moved me to tears while I was on break in the middle of the day. Tremendous stuff – what a beautiful way to share that story.

Well done, Rauch Bros. Thank you.

It’s a beautiful short.

It made me sad, and made me think “this man shot a Nazi in wartime, thought he looked like an angel and is haunted by that shooting. In part, just the act of killing another person up close is cause for that, and there’s likely some added remorse because the other soldier was young, but I can’t escape the part about him being blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, so handsome. A Nazi soldier and he saw an angel. It makes me wonder if he’d fought in Iraq and killed a handsome, young Iraqi soldier if he’d be haunted by it in the same way. I’d like to think he would, but fear that he wouldn’t.” An unintended effect of the short, but one that was there for me.

I was very moved by this. Thank you for sharing. This is a wonderful example that the boundaries for animation are infinite and there are so many interesting stories to tell (and ways to tell them) that are outside the arena of mainstream animation.

Glad I finally got to see the whole video of this. Awesome work.

We’ve seen documentary footage of wars, and we’ve heard people tell their stories. And yet, animation seems to be the most poignant way to communicate such a message. What a medium this is.

Tim, thanks for the reply. I did know about the Hitlerjugend, and it is a horror of that war, and the child involvement in Vietnam and Iraq is horrifying as well, although with that fighting taking place on their home soil, more understandable. The recognition of youth as well as the simple act of killing another person so close up and personally are definitely affecting, even when its as necessary as he stated (calling for a surrender and having a gun raised to him). I definitely empathise there, but aside from that was a visceral reaction to his description of the blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, handsome boy as angelic and I had to wonder how many other soldiers in WWII would have thought the same, or how many Vietnam War soldiers would in similar circumstances or the Iraq war. World War II was the last war the United States has fought against white enemies, and durring that war, in the U.S., most German Americans were treated no different from usual, while many Asian americans were treated openly horribly and even sent to camps.

Pieces like this are intended to make people think, and those are some of the thoughts this also conjured for me along side the more obvious sadness and empathy for a soldier who had to kill another person up close and live haunted by the image of that soldier the rest of his life.