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Das dumme Gänslein (The Silly Goose) is one in a trio of German animated short films produced in 1944 by Hans Fischerkoesen, who was the chief animator and author. It is a tale of a female goose consumed by adventure and urban glamour in her countryside life, who has to be saved from a cunning fox by her friends and family. The overt moral of the cartoon is to avoid an extravagant and adventurous life due to its possible unexpected consequences, but rather to lead a ‘normal’ (German) family life. Though this "There's no place like home" theme was a commonplace of 1930s and '40s animation, in this cartoon there is special emphasis, typical of Nazi propaganda, on the Völkisch ideology of conformity and conventionality, portraying individualism and sexual freedom as inherently both alien and dangerous. The cartoon suggests that divergence from traditional German life could be dire, even possibly lethal, in line with National Socialist characterizations of opponents of the regime as asocial, disloyal, and self-destructive. The film also hints at anti-Semitism through the character of the cunning fox.