War has been a common topic of films ever since they first appeared in the early 20th century. Over the years, war film was approached from different angles, promoting different ideologies, be it military propaganda, pacifism, or any other. Through chosen examples of American and Japanese war film, this paper aimed to show how war films can differ from one another, adopt different approaches to the same topic while fitting into certain ideological frames and discourses. Theory of representation by Stuart Hall helped explain the notion of “Otherness” that is one of the major segments of war propaganda in films. Furthermore, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities offer a better understanding of nationalism and hence, its role in war films. Hollywood films that were analyzed in this thesis, The Green Berets (1968) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) are great examples of Hollywood war film propaganda. However, examples from Japanese cinema, such as Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and The Wind Rises (2013) by Studio Ghibli show through the dominant pacifist discourse what the war is like for people who might not be on the battlefield, but still suffer the grave consequences and brutality of the war.