Soviet animation was aimed at maintaining the value system of this historical period, which was expressed in the interpretation of the plots. The central questions for us are: what value aspects were considered priority by Soviet animators and what techniques these aspects were implemented in animated films.
V. A. Starevich stands at the origins of Russian animation. In 1912, for the first time in Russia, the domestic animated film “The Beautiful Lyukanida”, made in the technique of puppet animation, was released. By their nature, cinema, and with it animation, are a continuation of fair traditions. Having been born as a farcical spectacle, cinema has adopted many of its features: entertainment, attraction, motives of popular fairy tales. This influence can also be traced in the characters of the cartoon by Starevich. It is no accident that insects become cartoon characters. For example, the performance of a trained flea was a classic attraction of all holidays and fairs in Russia and abroad. Flea trainers made them dance, fight duels and march. Accordingly, the audience was ready to believe in the reality of what was happening on the screen.
“The Beautiful Lyukanida”
After the revolution of 1917, the task of the new Soviet government was to create a new state. Communism and with it socialism, as the highest form of communism, assumed, first of all, the value of the collective and its fundamental role in the order of the new state. To promote their new ideology, the Communists adopted the sphere of culture and, above all, such a mass spectacle as cinema. In 1924, at the XIII Congress of the RCP (b), I. V. Stalin declared that “cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. The task is to take it into your own hands.”
Animation of that time followed the cinema – the drawn characters had to carry an idea corresponding to the state ideology. The primary goal was to form an idea of the “enemy of the people” in the new Soviet man. This task is answered by such cartoons as “Soviet Toys” (directed by D. Vetrov, 1924), where the bourgeois and confessors with their lifestyle contradicting the working man and the peasant are shown in an impartial way. And after they are exposed, they are hung on a Christmas tree symbolizing the USSR (by analogy, “new year – new life – new state”), and a worker and a peasant stand at the head in the form of a star. Also, the enemy of the people is visualized in the image of a fat capitalist in a top hat and with a cigar in his teeth.
We see such characters in the cartoons “Interplanetary Revolution” (1924), “China on Fire” (directed by Z. Komisarenko, Yu. Merkulov. N. Khodataev, 1925), “Black and White” (directed by I. Ivanov-Vano, 1932). Also in these tapes clearly traced the thought of the victory of the proletariat and the building of communism outside the Soviet country. So, in the “Interplanetary Revolution”, the red warrior, having defeated all the bourgeois on earth, flies to other planets, where he overthrows the exploiting class. The three-part half-hour animated film “China on Fire” was created as a political slogan of support for the revolution in China in 1925-1927, as well as as an artistic response to the signing of the Soviet-Chinese treaty in 1924.
By the end of the 1930s, we are witnessing such a phenomenon as the “Westernization of animation”. And there is some contradiction here. On the one hand, cultural policy comes into confrontation with the “capitalist environment” and continues to pursue the course of “building socialism in a single country.” The animators faced the task of fully providing the Soviet viewer with animation products of domestic production. On the other hand, the government’s decision was to create its own film industry, in which animated films were created according to the Western model, like conveyor production. And such a transition to a new type of studio system resulted in the cessation of the search for one’s own artistic expressiveness (in the embodiment of images, in the presentation of the plot, in artistic techniques, etc.) and led to a change in the aesthetic concept. All this turned into a temporary loss of the uniqueness and originality of Soviet animation, gave rise to patterns and monotony.
In the animated film directed by Ivanov-Vano “Kotofey Kotofeevich” (1937), a Russian folk tale is drawn in the style of Disney animation, and the main character Kotofey Kotofeevich is performed as a prototype of the Disney character Mickey Mouse.
The next stage in the development of Soviet animation correlates with the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. The few animated films of the war period include propaganda films calling for the defense of the Motherland and visualizing the enemy in extremely caricatured images. Thus, in the series of cartoons “Journal of Political Satire No. 2” and “Kinotsirk”, Hitler and the collective image of a fascist are presented in grotesquely farcical images.
The transition from war to peace has created a favorable influence for the development of animation. A huge number of adaptations of fairy tales for children are being released on the screens. This, of course, was facilitated by the work on creating a streaming release of animated tapes. Many cartoons were shot in an “eclair” way of animation, in which the characters were copied from living people, which gave the movements of the characters maximum realism. Also, the most important moment for domestic animation was the fact that animators stopped reproducing the artistic style and animation technique of the Disney studio. It was decided to start creating domestic heroes taken from the rich Russian folklore.
“Journal of Political Satire No. 2″As a result of consideration of this issue, it can be said that by the early 1950s, Soviet animation not only became a separate branch of film production, but also finally acquired its own features in the embodiment of artistic images, techniques and themes, forming its own unique style. During its formation, the main task facing the multipliers was the upbringing of a child, his socialization as a member of society, the formation of universal values and basic ideas about good and evil, about the family, about everything that a real citizen of a new state should know.
Author of the article: Varvara Kartushina
