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Tuesday 7 October 2008

Under cover of absurdity

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

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American army, on one of its first assignments, requisitioned Disney Studios and remained there for eight months. It was the only studio to suffer that fate but Walt Disney, ever the patriot, was more than obliging.

By 1942, 93 per cent of his output (which was by now the largest of any Hollywood studio) was under government contract. He produced propaganda cartoons, such as the 1943 anti-Nazi film Education for Death, a series of animated instructional films — including, quite improbably, A Few Quick Facts about Venereal Disease — and enlisted Donald Duck full-time. In the words of one historian, Disney became a ‘bona fide war plant’.

At the same time in Britain, the Ministry of Information’s Film Division was advancing the animated cartoon as an ideal form for political propaganda. With cartoons, it declared, you had the advantage of being able to insert ideas ‘under cover of absurdity ...They can present...a system of ethics in which independence and individuality are always successful, bullies are made fools of, the weak can cheek the strong with impunity.’

Cartoons could and would subvert reality. They could stretch it or simplify it, mock it or idealise it. Utopias could be formed and tyrannies toppled in seconds. It’s not so strange, then, that time and again both the political élites and their popular critics took up animation to propagate their ideas.

In the wider scheme of things, Marjane Satrapi’s darkly satirical take on recent Iranian history, Persepolis (released next Friday), a trip through war, revolution and persecution, is more the norm than a curious aberration. Politics and film cartooning have been partners in crime from the beginning.

The earliest surviving animation is a patriotic advertisement for the Boer War from 1899 by Arthur Melbourne Cooper. A pile of matches come to life, climb on to each other and write a message on a blackboard. ‘An Appeal,’ they write. ‘For one guinea, Messrs Bryant and May will forward a box of matches to each man in a battalion. With the name of the sender inside. NB Our Soldiers need them.’

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