Private Snafu in No Buddy Atoll (1945), the knocked-out officer

A black-and-white frame from No Buddy Atoll, a 1945 Private Snafu cartoon made for the War Department's Army First Motion Picture Unit and animated by Warner Bros. Cartoons under Chuck Jones. A Japanese naval officer drawn with an ape-like jaw lies stunned beside Snafu.

Content note: the frame shows a racial caricature of a Japanese officer. It is described here as the film drew it.

The frame

There are no words in this still. The archive checked the extracted frame for lettering and found none, so the picture has to be read on its own.

On the ground lies a figure in a dark naval coat with epaulettes and a plumed bicorne hat. His eyes are shut, stars circle his head, and a drawn sword lies by his hand. Beside him Private Snafu, in an Army cap, folds up a broken umbrella. The comic setup is plain enough: the enemy officer is out cold and Snafu is still standing.

The caricature

The archive tags the frame with name-calling, done here by drawing rather than by a word. The officer has a flat face and an ape-like jaw and brow. That is the part of the frame that does the work. A cartoon can make an enemy officer pompous or foolish without making his face less than human. This one did the second thing, and doing it in a film made under the War Department's name was wrong.

The record dates this frame to 8 October 1945. It is silent on who saw the film, where it was shown, and how many prints were made.

Who made it

The maker line names the U.S. War Department, through the Army First Motion Picture Unit, with animation by Warner Bros. Cartoons and direction by Chuck Jones. That pairing of a government client and a private studio is worth noticing: the studio supplied the craft, and the War Department was the sponsor. The archive's copy comes from the Internet Archive's Private Snafu collection.

A second Snafu frame in the archive, from Operation Snafu, shows a sword-carrying Japanese soldier caricature. On this site, the Tokio Kid page covers another single caricature reused across a series, in that case on 1942 plant posters, and the anti-Japanese WWII hub collects wartime material against Japan. The title card of Know Your Enemy: Japan is from another 1945 Army film about Japan.