Pamphlets & Politics: The Web

In its history of now more than 100 years, animation has always had a close, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit relation to politics and social criticism. Famous animated films such as Andrei Khrjanovsky's There Lived Kozyavin, Derek Lamb's Every Child or Yuri Norstein's Tale of Tales, are just three examples out of a long tradition. Also, whenever countries are at war and go through times of crisis, animation is instrumentalized by governments both as a means to entertain, to reeducate but also to infiltrate the population with propaganda. Animation is often assumed to be more effective than live-action films for those purposes as audiences are likely to deal with certain ideas when they are presented in an animated and abstract way. In the last ten years, the rise of the Internet has revolutionized the animation landscape in many ways. On the one hand, new distribution outlets like DVD and video hosters on the Internet 'reanimate' these almost forgotten forms by providing them a plattform where they can be accessed and viewed (e.g. the movie collection at the Internet archive). On the other hand, broadband access, the communicative possibilities of the Internet, powerful home computers which can be used as film studios and new animation techniques have lowered the barriers for individuals and amateurs to make their voices heard. New forms of animation have evolved and flourish on the Internet such as the vector-based animations produced with Macromedia Flash, Brickfilms which are stop-motion animated films with Lego and Machinima which refers to 3D animations which exploit computer games as tools for filmmaking.

Showing in this program