Peter's Picture Poems

A star-spangled sock on the nose for Kaiser Wilhelm, as this wordplay propaganda cartoon meets war crimes with pun-ishment

There's propagandistic punning aplenty in this WWI animated short. Turning "RUSSIA" into "U ASS" might not be the most sophisticated humour, but you can bet it got a laugh out of contemporary cinema audiences tired of three years of war. Director and animator Anson Dyer had moved into film early in 1915 after having trained as a stained glass artist, and would become a leading figure of British animation into the 1940s.