Journal of Transnational American Studies

The Marshall Plan is mostly remembered for its allegedly stimulating impact on the economic recovery of Western Europe following World War II. While scholars have questioned this aspect, the effects of soft power, however, cannot be overestimated for a young generation of Europeans. European complicity in producing, disseminating, and circulating iconic images helped to create the myth of the Marshall Plan, whose repercussions are still evident today. Renewed calls for new Marshall plans to solve major crises from COVID-19 to climate change and most recently the recovery of war-torn Ukraine abound. In the following article, I will take a close look at a special dimension of the Marshall Plan propaganda that has often been pushed to the margins: the visual grammar of animation films.

Examining six short, animated films aimed at young audiences in Germany, collectively called “Hugo at the Circus” by Toonder Studios, about the German caricature Hugo and his self-inflated ego, I will investigate these as interpictorial clusters in the sense theorized by Udo Hebel and propose that they are part of a grammar of graphics employed in the films that also is based on the rich corpus of visual sources of the Marshall Plan information campaigns between 1948 and 1952. Contrary to the assumption that Marshall Plan filmmakers in the European Recovery Project countries had a lot of freedom in framing their stories of inter-European collaboration, the case of the Hugo films shows how Americans intervened in and shaped the animation sequences created in Toonder’s Dutch animation studio. By uncovering the strategies behind the animation program and mapping the European-American imagery to educate West German audiences, this article will reveal the carefully constructed use of soft power across different media to exert influence on and redirect German self-interest towards transnational goals.