Armer Hansi (Poor Hansi) is a 18 minutes-long German animated short directed by Gerhard Fieber. It was released in 1943.
Hansi is a songbird who seeks to escape his cage and meet with an attractive female of a different species he has a crush on. He manages to escape the cage and finds himself confronted to the outside world.
This short is notable for being one of Nazi Germany's attempts at producing animation of significant quality to try to rival that of Walt Disney's studios. Adolf Hitler was so impressed by the groundbreaking animation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that he ordered Joseph Goebbels to create a studio that would be able to reduce the technical gap between German and American productions. Thus the Deutsche Zeichenfilm studio was born in 1941. It was shut down in late 1944 due to the needs of the war effort.
Tropes:
- Animate Inanimate Object: Hansi bumps into a living kite that tries to eat him.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Hansi enters the nest of his initial crush... only to be kicked out of it by said crush's mate, who belongs to the same species as her.
- Distracted by the Sexy: Hansi as soon as he sees a female bird of a different species walking by his cage.
- Happily Ever After: Hansi eventually meets a female of his species and enters her cage. They kiss each other and sing, and the short ends with a red curtain with two Heart Symbols pierced by an arrow falling on the cage.
- Random Events Plot: The short is mostly about Hansi's wandering and misadventures as he's thrown in the world outside his cage.
- Rule of Symbolism: Given that it's a Nazi propaganda effort, and especially one aimed at children, the racial metaphors in this are as poisonous and unsubtle as they come.
- Hansi's desire to stray from his cage, and his love for a bird a different species than his own, leads to misery, heartbreak and danger. It isn't until he finds a new home and falls for a bird of his own kind that he achieves true happiness.
- A kite with a stereotypical Chinese face threatens Hansi while he's flying in the air — until he accidentally divebombs it and destroys it in one blow, proving it's harmless and only made of paper.note
- Covered in soot from a chimney, Hansi is invited to sing with a flock of croaking, off-key brown birds on telephone lines. As he sings beautifully, he begins to fly upwards and shed his soot, revealing himself to be light-feathered. The brown birds, irritated and jealous of his talent, pull him back on the line (literally, dragging him down with them) and catapult him away.
- Hansi tries to eat from a sunflower, but a dozen black birds swarm onto it and pick away every seed, leaving nothing behind for him.
- The montage of different birds turning him away in the thunderstorm is a blatant analogy for the concept of lebensraum.
- Surprisingly, seemingly averted at one point. When the cat chasing Hansi gets a flowerpot dropped on its head, its whiskers droop into a mustache and it looks like it's wearing a tasselled fez (complete with Islamic moon and star); given that Turkey still had official, if not particularly strong, diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany at that point, it's more likely a boilerplate racist gag, common for most cartoons — American or German — of the time.
- Sky Surfing: At one point, Hansi ice-skates in the sky instead of using his wings to fly.
