Russia cancels ban on film of ‘Nazi’ Donald Duck
Famed Disney animated star was banned in 2002 because of anti-Nazi propaganda film misunderstood by Russian court
A court in Russia has cleared the Walt Disney character Donald Duck from accusations of extremism 73 years after a Disney short featured him in a Nazi uniform.
The eight-minute animated short, “Der Fuehrer’s Face” was made as a propaganda clip to boost morale in America.
The movie shows Donald Duck as a worker in a Nazi factory and serves as a warning on what life under the Third Reich could be like.
The duck is shown happy to wake up as an American and realize that his episode as a Nazi was just a bad dream.
The publishing of Nazi symbols is banned by law in Russia and so the clip’s negative view of the Nazi regime was missed by Russian authorities.
In 2012, a local resident in Kamchatka, in the east of Siberia, uploaded the cartoon and was arrested and then given a suspended sentence for “inciting racial hatred” by a municipal court, according to a report in the Daily Mail.
Later, prosecutors realized the mistake and went back to court to admit that the clip starring Donald Duck was in fact a piece of anti-Nazi propaganda.
The cartoon will now be removed from a list of 3,700 banned items.
The list came into existence in 2002, two years after Vladimir Putin was first elected to the Kremlin.
The film’s director Jack Kinney won an Academy Award for best animated short cartoon in 1943.
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