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Clip description
This animated advertisement, seen here in its entirety, aims to persuade cinemagoers to invest in five shilling war-saving stamps and the 4th Liberty Loan. It features on-screen slogans, a voice-over narration, an instrumental music score and caricatures of a Japanese soldier, Adolf Hitler and a koala dressed in a military uniform.
Curator’s notes
The use of animation in this advertisement allows for creative choices not available in a live-action format, such as the morphing of money into munitions and the use of comedy to portray a knocked-out Hitler on a rubbish dump. The racist caricature of a Japanese soldier (with buck teeth and diagonally slanting eyes) aimed to dehumanise the enemy and was not uncommon in propaganda of the time, especially given the closer proximity to Australia of Japanese military forces.
The slogan ‘back the attack’ was used in a series of advertisements in support of the Fourth Liberty Loan. Here it appears in combination with other short, emotive phrases such as ‘smash the Jap’ and ‘knock out Hitler’ to reinforce to audiences the imperative of supporting the campaign.
