Paul Virilio's remark that "war is cinema, cinema is war" rightly focused not only on the relationship between war and the content of cinema, but also on the similarity between war and the cinematic apparatus itself. However, such reasoning has tended to emphasize the apparatus itself rather than the role of spectators in the film's relationship to war. This article shows precisely that, in fact, during World War II, the Japanese film world considered audience participation in the unfolding of the so-called "Film War" to be essential. Critics both worried about reception, especially by other Asian spectators of Japanese film, and imagined spectators who actively made films support the war effort. Spectators, it was felt, had to be trained, if not constrained. The article ends by comparing the wartime animated work Momotaro's Sea Eagles with Kurosawa Kiyoshi's 2001 Cinema and Travel to discuss their different approaches to media and spectatorship.