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Thursday 4 December 2008

Under cover of absurdity

Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the power of animation to subvert and propagate ideas

Most useful for politics was caricature. In the Manichean conditions of war, enemies had to be rendered unimaginably repellent. Repellent enough to murder. On this cartoons could really deliver. Visual metaphors — and often the cruder the better — would quickly stick. Blood-sucking Jewish bankers would grow proboscises and suck their victims to death. Grasping American businessmen became lithe spiders literally crawling over countries, gathering bags of cash. Nazis became vultures or pigs or beetles.

The full fantastical potential of the cartoon, however, and its ability to reinvent reality could only be exploited by a system that needed these propaganda tools for revolution and social transformation — not just for a bit of light joshing. The Soviet Union was just such a country. In 1925 it made Interplanetary Revolution, advocating an expansion into space of the global struggle against capitalism. An event that, the cartoon declared optimistically, would happen by 1929. Brilliant new effects were created to show a capitalist takeover of Mars and its swift defeat at the hands of Communist Comrade Cominternov.

In America, questions that were asked of society were suddenly being directed at the creators of Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop. Was the bawdy farmyard realism really appropriate for family entertainment? In the 1933 short Spite Flight, for example, Willie Whopper flies past heaven disturbing St Peter, who turns around and gives Willie the finger. Sexual references abounded, as did alcoholism and allusions to drug-taking — Betty Boop sings about snorting cocaine in Dave Fleischer’s Snow White.

The emergence of enforceable film censorship in 1936 forced the studios to button up. Cartoonists turned less experimental and more prim, covering cows’ udders with skirts. Disney, the arch-conservative, began to hanker after believability above all else. A cloud of stylistic and political conservatism moved over Hollywood.

Going against the reactionary spirit were John Hubley, Dave Hilberman and Stephen Bosustow, all at one time or another communist party members. Buoyed by the 1941 animators’ strike at Disney, the increased strength of the unions and the socialist solidarity among the wartime forces, the triumvirate left Disney to go it alone, setting up United Productions of America that same year. The new studio, taking on political projects such as the re-election campaign for Roosevelt in 1944, embraced a radically different political outlook that demonstrated a tougher, jerkier, more surreal graphic and narrative style, which could convey political and moral information directly.

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