Hello everyone at AWN...I trust you are all well !! I think I posted this thread originally in the wrong place, so apologies if you have already seen me waffle on...
My name is Charlotte and I'm a third year university student, and for my dissertation, I have chosen to write about the potency of animation as an art form, particularly in it's effective use as a propaganda weapon.
I know there is already a thread about interviews, but I was just wondering if there are any wonderful animators out there who have experience with this use of animation ???? Books are a great resource, don't get me wrong, but I'd love to hear the views of anyone who has had some kind of working knowledge in the area.
If you are the wonderful person/people I am searching for, and you have a spare moment, PLEASE email me your thoughts and comments..you'll get a fab reference in my dissertation I promise !!!
Charlotte
Yeah, I guess all artists would have a moral/political opinion, and it will show through, whether it was the original purpose of the material os not. So I suppose I would call it propaganda when it is the objective of the film to deliver a certain message. In that case something like South Park would still be at the borderline, but I'd be inclined to call it anti/estabilishment propaganda, because it does want to deliver a message.
And, believe me, I know propaganda. If you have a friend coming to the forbidden island, I could send you a few examples of ours.
By the way, here we tend to use the term propaganda also for commercials.
I don't have any working knowledge, but I'm fascinated by the subject.
You're probably already aware of the WW2-era propaganda 'toons like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips and Russian Rhapsody.
There are also several Fleischer 'toons like Popeye in You're a Sap, Mr. Jap and Scrap the Japs, and Superman in Japoteurs and Eleventh Hour.
The DVD, Walt Disney Treasures - On the Front Lines, is rich with this kind of stuff. I'd hardly call the set a "treasure" though.
Some of the most obscene are Warner Bros' Drafty Isn't it?, A Hitch in Time, and 90 Day Wandering, which try to con kids into enlisting to fight the commies.
As for contemporary propaganda 'toons, there are a bunch popping up on the internet.
Check out Schlock 'N' Awe ( http://www.bootbush.info/watch.html ) and Yogi Bush ( http://www.campchaos.com/show.php?iID=867 ). Actually, these might be more accurately classified as parody, rather than propaganda.
Hey Harvey...
Thanks for the references...I agree, "On the Front Lines" is not quite the treasure trove you'd hope for.
How would you feel about giving your professional insight into using animation in such a way? I'd love to enlist an animator to help me put my essay into some sort of historical context...it'd just basically be your opinions on the future of the art-form as a propaganda weapon, with the advent of 3D animation etc.
Please feel free to decline if you don't want to participate, (I know it's incredibly cheeky of me to ask) and thanks once again for your help in locating resources...
Hope 2005 is treating you well,
Charlotte
Well, you already have something on the anti-communist propaganda. I could , from where I stand offer a few more examples, with a completely different bias. In my country, nearly 99 percent of cartoons are some kind of propaganda... or "educational" and I do recall a few russian... sorry, we used to call russian all eastern europeans. A very popular one, because it was american style was about a wolf chasing a bunny... Sound familiar? But here the bunny was a law abiding citizen and a member of the governmental organizations, whereas the wolf donned western clothes and listened to rocknroll. You can guess the fate of the poor wolf. I believe there should be a website with the old stuff somewhere. I recall the companies were called sovexportfilm and somethinfg like soyuzmultfilm. You may want to do some research.
Moo, I don't really have any professional insight, since I don't have any professional experience creating animated propaganda, unless corporate advertising counts as such.
I guess essentially most advertising is a form of propaganda.
Animation is just another medium, like newspapers or music. It's the development of propaganda, who is developing it, and why they're developing it that is important, not necessarily the medium that carries it.
However, where animation as a propagandistic medium is particularly egregious, is its targetting of the highly-impressionable minds of children. Maybe that can be your focus. If Bugs Bunny says the Japanese look like monkeys - as he actually did in 1944 - children will take it to heart.
Sometimes the technique of animated propaganda is simply to take something cold and evil - like racism or the desire of a plutocracy to subjugate the globe - and make it warm and cuddly.
Teenage boys joined the military and either got killed in Vietnam or killed villagers partly because of what was being sold to them in WB's enlistment cartoons of the 1960s. Sorry, folks, but Chuck Jones has blood on his hands.
You also might look at what the American theocrats would probably refer to as left-wing propaganda: the recent furor over Spongebob and some bunny on PBS promoting the evils of tolerance.
But what exactly qualifies as propaganda? Can South Park's morality plays against Rob Reiner and Mel Gibson be classified as propaganda?