Films By Jove Launches Animated Soviet Propaganda Series
Films by Jove has begun delivery of the much anticipated ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA series. The unique anthology is based on more than three dozen anti-American, anti-German, anti-British, anti-Japanese, anti-Capitalist and anti-Imperialist animated shorts produced by the Soviets from 1924-1984.
“I first discovered that the USSR had animated propaganda in 1995, three years after our company acquired worldwide distribution rights to much of the library of Moscow’s Soyuzmultfilm Studio,” said Joan Borsten, president of Films by Jove. “We were compiling the MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV’S STORIES FROM MY CHILDHOOD anthology. We found, buried among the award-winning animated classics for children, and the equally lauded auteur animated shorts which would become the series known as MASTERS OF RUSSIAN ANIMATION, several dozen films that were, well, clearly of another genre.
“They were ideological in content and although the hallmark of the Soyuzmultfilm library is that the films, by design, are non-violent, these films were filled with images of guns, tanks, war and destruction.”
Borsten then found copies of animated propaganda films made in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, before Soyuzmultfilm Studio was founded, including SOVIET TOYS, the very first Soviet animated film, which was made in 1924 by acclaimed documentary director Dziga Vertov. Artistically influenced by avant-garde art of the ‘20s and the posters of the Bolshevik Revolution, they ranged in style from simple line drawings, to cut-outs. Combined with the Soyuzmultfilm propaganda shorts, which were mostly made using Disney-style 2D animation, Borsten realized that collectively the animated propaganda not only chronicled the history of the USSR, but the history of Soviet animation’s artistic development.
“Unfortunately my husband [Russian actor Oleg Vidov who defected in 1985] apparently slept through the courses in SCIENTIFIC COMMUNISM and HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY that all Soviet students were required to take,” she said. “He was of no help. So I began asking Soviet animation historians about these ‘ideological’ films, again with disappointing results. Apparently no one had ever before looked at these films as a genre. Then one day in 2000, by chance, we showed some of them to our house guest, Igor Kokarev, a professor of film sociology at the Russian State Film Institute. Igor, who once worked for the USSR’s US-Canada Institute, had studied Soviet propaganda for years. He immediately put them into context and philosophically and politically.”
Borsten began by dividing the films into four categories: The American Imperialists, The Fascist Barbarians, The Capitalist Sharks, and The Shining Soviet Future. For each category, she created a 26-minute overview, which combines film clips with narration and interviews. Throughout the overviews Kokarev explains the Soviet political system, while Fyodor Khitruk — one of Soyuzmultfilm’s leading film directors — explains the films within context of Soviet animation.
Others commentators include: Vladimir Tarasov, who directed two of the films and worked as an artist on a third; caricaturist Boris Yefimov, who worked on three of the films as an artist and writer; Vladimir Paperny, a former Soviet writer, designer and cultural historian; Sofia Marshak whose great grandfather Samuel Marshak wrote MISTER TWISTER, the poem about an American racist which Soyuzmultfilm animated in 1963.
It took Borsten, a former journalist, several years to complete the historical and political research.
“I first discovered that the USSR had animated propaganda in 1995, three years after our company acquired worldwide distribution rights to much of the library of Moscow’s Soyuzmultfilm Studio,” said Joan Borsten, president of Films by Jove. “We were compiling the MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV’S STORIES FROM MY CHILDHOOD anthology. We found, buried among the award-winning animated classics for children, and the equally lauded auteur animated shorts which would become the series known as MASTERS OF RUSSIAN ANIMATION, several dozen films that were, well, clearly of another genre.
“They were ideological in content and although the hallmark of the Soyuzmultfilm library is that the films, by design, are non-violent, these films were filled with images of guns, tanks, war and destruction.”
Borsten then found copies of animated propaganda films made in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, before Soyuzmultfilm Studio was founded, including SOVIET TOYS, the very first Soviet animated film, which was made in 1924 by acclaimed documentary director Dziga Vertov. Artistically influenced by avant-garde art of the ‘20s and the posters of the Bolshevik Revolution, they ranged in style from simple line drawings, to cut-outs. Combined with the Soyuzmultfilm propaganda shorts, which were mostly made using Disney-style 2D animation, Borsten realized that collectively the animated propaganda not only chronicled the history of the USSR, but the history of Soviet animation’s artistic development.
“Unfortunately my husband [Russian actor Oleg Vidov who defected in 1985] apparently slept through the courses in SCIENTIFIC COMMUNISM and HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY that all Soviet students were required to take,” she said. “He was of no help. So I began asking Soviet animation historians about these ‘ideological’ films, again with disappointing results. Apparently no one had ever before looked at these films as a genre. Then one day in 2000, by chance, we showed some of them to our house guest, Igor Kokarev, a professor of film sociology at the Russian State Film Institute. Igor, who once worked for the USSR’s US-Canada Institute, had studied Soviet propaganda for years. He immediately put them into context and philosophically and politically.”
Borsten began by dividing the films into four categories: The American Imperialists, The Fascist Barbarians, The Capitalist Sharks, and The Shining Soviet Future. For each category, she created a 26-minute overview, which combines film clips with narration and interviews. Throughout the overviews Kokarev explains the Soviet political system, while Fyodor Khitruk — one of Soyuzmultfilm’s leading film directors — explains the films within context of Soviet animation.
Others commentators include: Vladimir Tarasov, who directed two of the films and worked as an artist on a third; caricaturist Boris Yefimov, who worked on three of the films as an artist and writer; Vladimir Paperny, a former Soviet writer, designer and cultural historian; Sofia Marshak whose great grandfather Samuel Marshak wrote MISTER TWISTER, the poem about an American racist which Soyuzmultfilm animated in 1963.
It took Borsten, a former journalist, several years to complete the historical and political research.
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