While America was busy rousting Bolsheviks in our bathrooms and ratting out Reds in Hollywood, the Soviets were just as tormented by paranoia, struggling just as hard to vilify their capitalist foes. A sobering gander through the political looking glass, Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika is a four-DVD, six-hour tribute to the artistry and bald fear-mongering of the Soviet propaganda machine. Previously unseen in the West, these cartoons—spanning from the ’20s to the early ’80s—were unearthed from Moscow’s famous animation studio Soyuzmultfilm and include the first Soviet animation, 1924’s “Soviet Toys,” from noted avant-gardist Dziga Vertov.
Vile capitalists appear to be the predominant caricatures in this fun-house-mirror rendering of life seen through myopic Soviet eyes. Racist, murderous, warmongering decadents in top hats, the “American Imperialists” of Part 1 do, however, have the psychological advantage of walking upright. Not so the subhuman Nazis of “Part 2: Fascist Barbarians,” characterized in a remarkably elastic bestial lexicon as pitiful, scrap-begging lapdogs, sharks with Ginsu teeth or lumpen goons defeated by the saucer-eyed anime moppets in “The Adventures of the Young Pioneers” (1971).
Hard to write off as pure political kitsch, Animated Soviet Propaganda has a more depressing, hate-filled strain drawn from the same secret history root cellar of racist Hollywood cartoons and the American animation studios adept at inflammatory wartime propaganda, including Warner Bros. and even Walt Disney.
While some of the more artful collage suggests children’s illustrators like Eric Carle and Miroslav Sasek, lyricism takes on a horrifying dimension when combined with the kind of political critique offered in 1972’s “Ave Maria.” This scorching propaganda piece blends religious tranquility with images of Vietnamese children being torched in a rain of napalm hellfire to the tranquil Schubert composition.
Like Team America from an unironic age, the cartoons illustrate the vicious, excretory potential when animation is hijacked away from the kiddies and imbued with a deadly serious adult agenda. Animated Soviet Propaganda shows the universality of propaganda as the crudest, most irrationally venomous form—somewhere between cinema and bathroom graffiti.
Vile capitalists appear to be the predominant caricatures in this fun-house-mirror rendering of life seen through myopic Soviet eyes. Racist, murderous, warmongering decadents in top hats, the “American Imperialists” of Part 1 do, however, have the psychological advantage of walking upright. Not so the subhuman Nazis of “Part 2: Fascist Barbarians,” characterized in a remarkably elastic bestial lexicon as pitiful, scrap-begging lapdogs, sharks with Ginsu teeth or lumpen goons defeated by the saucer-eyed anime moppets in “The Adventures of the Young Pioneers” (1971).
Hard to write off as pure political kitsch, Animated Soviet Propaganda has a more depressing, hate-filled strain drawn from the same secret history root cellar of racist Hollywood cartoons and the American animation studios adept at inflammatory wartime propaganda, including Warner Bros. and even Walt Disney.
While some of the more artful collage suggests children’s illustrators like Eric Carle and Miroslav Sasek, lyricism takes on a horrifying dimension when combined with the kind of political critique offered in 1972’s “Ave Maria.” This scorching propaganda piece blends religious tranquility with images of Vietnamese children being torched in a rain of napalm hellfire to the tranquil Schubert composition.
Like Team America from an unironic age, the cartoons illustrate the vicious, excretory potential when animation is hijacked away from the kiddies and imbued with a deadly serious adult agenda. Animated Soviet Propaganda shows the universality of propaganda as the crudest, most irrationally venomous form—somewhere between cinema and bathroom graffiti.
