No one, post-Charlie Hebdo, can doubt a cartoon’s capacity to change the world — R. Crumb’s breezy remonstrance “It’s only lines on paper, folks!” notwithstanding. Animated cartoons are generally more circumspect than static drawings, but some have been agitators as well.

Winsor McCay made an animated propaganda short, “The Sinking of the Lusitania,” to support America’s entry into World War I; during the Second World War, the Disney studio produced the feature-length “Victory Through Air Power” as an argument for strategic bombing. On another front, Warner Bros. cartoons like “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” (1943) were attacked for their racial caricatures — as was Disney’s softer-edge blend of live-action and animation “Song of the South” (1946).

A few animations have directly addressed such propaganda or stereotyping. Jimmy T. Murakami’s “When the Wind Blows” (1986), released on Blu-ray late last year by Twilight Time, is a subversively cute and cuddly, surprisingly graphic cartoon on the effects of a nuclear blast. By lampooning stereotypes found elsewhere in the movies, Ralph Bakshi’s “Coonskin,” a cartoon-and-live-action amalgam from 1975 out on DVD from Xenon Pictures and distributed by Facets Video, evoked (and incited) another sort of firestorm. Both are sendups, but if “When the Wind Blows” has the deadpan mockery of the early-’60s British revue “Beyond the Fringe” (which included a skit about the end of the world), “Coonskin” owes much to Richard Pryor’s extravagant ghetto sketches.

Adapted by Raymond Briggs from his graphic novel, “When the Wind Blows” concerns an elderly English couple in rural Sussex. Warned that nuclear war is imminent, the moon-faced pensioners Jim and Hilda Bloggs (voices supplied by John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft) do their gently dithering best to follow government instructions, laying away supplies and building a rudimentary fallout shelter. Hilda is doubtful, but Jim is resolute: “Ours is not to reason why — we must do the correct thing,” he explains more than once.