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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

UPA had released a stylistic genie from the bottle. A dissenting counterculture seized on the full subversive potential. Tex Avery, described as the Walt Disney who read Kafka, and Chuck Jones, who created the unending violence of Road Runner, introduced a whole scorched-earth nihilism to the Hollywood genre, while Gerald Scarfe’s Long Drawn Out Trip of 1973 turned the world upside-down by showing a grey, unshaven Mickey drugged up and hallucinating. Disney never forgot the avant-garde strikers. And when the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities convened in 1947, their first eager witness was Walt, whose testimony provoked the headlines: ‘Communists tried to capture Mickey.’ Revenge was sweet: by 1952 UPA was forced to close down.

Behind the Iron Curtain, politics coursed through animation, as dissenting cartoonists injected even innocent fables with political subtexts. Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), in which a hedgehog becomes alienated from the world as a fog descends, was a safely ambiguous metaphor for what the state had done to Norstein. In Jan Lenica’s Monsieur Tête (1959), the tale of an everyman who wins state medals but starts to lose his features, the message gets closer to the bone. In Czechoslovakia, in Jiri Trnka’s The Hand (1965), in which a sculptor, tormented by a powerful, disembodied sculpture of a hand, loses his liberty and finally his life, the message was all too clear.

While we in the West became increasingly accustomed to seeing cartoons as mere child’s play, in Eastern Europe they became a political lifeline. And the state knew it. It banned The Hand in 1968, blacklisted Jan Svankmajer and his aggressive stop-motion reality in 1974, and Yuri Norstein in 1985.

Around the world, a genre that had been introduced to the people by states eager to instruct them was biting back. In the Philippines cartoonists ate away at the Marcos regime; in Yugoslavia they ushered in sexual liberation; in Germany, they pondered the feasibility of a body politic divided in two; and in America came The Simpsons. That the Islamic Revolution has now become a target should be no surprise.For much of the world, and for most of its history, animation had politics at its subversive core. With Persepolis, cartooning is simply coming home.

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