“I am a city”: perspectives of analysis on education, urbanization,and sanitation in the Americas based on the animated short film Environmental Sanitation (1945)

Abstract

During the Second World War, the US government created the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-Americans Affairs (CIAA), an agency that worked on strategies to approach and consolidate the relations between the country and Latin America. For this mission, Nelson Rockefeller, related to the Rockefeller Foundation, was put in charge. Debates from this period pointed out that health and the lack of sanitation were chronic issues in places with high illiteracy rates. Therefore, to solve this obstacle, Rockefeller invited Walt Disney to produce educational animated short films about these concerns, and create a mechanism to assist the education and literacy programs for the Latin-American population. This paper aims to explore the animation “Environmental Sanitation”, part of the “Health for the America” series (1944-1945), which uses the point of view of the City to narrate its transition from a small and poor village into a modern and urbanized place. By analyzing some aspects of the short film, we want to verify how the animation synthetizes the problems highlighted by Walt Disney and CIAA reports, which were also widely discussed by governments and intellectuals in meetings during the 1940s.