Doing Their Bit: Wartime American Animated Short Films, 1939-1945, 2d ed.

The golden age of animation stretched from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s, with movie cartoons reaching an extraordinarily high level of artistry and technique—far higher than today's TV cartoons, for instance.

Nearly 1000 cartoons were produced by the seven major animation studios in the U.S. between January 1, 1939, and September 30, 1945—the immediate pre-World War II period up to the cessation of hostilities. More than a quarter of the cartoons substantially refer to the war, and ther...