Tokio Jokio Review

Tokio Jokio is a 1943 animated short film from the Looney Tunes series. It is a bad, offensive short.

This short basically offers a completely trashy, propagandist look into Japan and its people, especially the military, through a series of unfunny gags and racial stereotypes. Personally, I always try to defend these old films for their insensitive content as they were made during a different time. However, this one is pretty much impossible to defend because it basically destroys the Japanese by portraying them in such a painful to watch, horrible, unrealistic and incompetent manner.

The animation is definitely decent and the film is certainly well made. However, the gags objectively do not work for today’s audiences as none of it is even remotely funny. The characters are awful stereotypes who are difficult to ignore. I get that it was made during World War II, but this was still such a primitive move and another proof that Americans only cared about those that hurt them personally as evidenced by excessive mocking of the Japanese while they left Germans pretty much unscathed.

Tokio Jokio certainly is well made, but a horribly stereotypical, painful to watch propaganda which ranks among the worst Looney Tunes ever made.