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Russian Propaganda

A scene from Russian cartoon Shooting Range
  • Posted at 10:30am
  • 16 November 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

When I was younger, watching Eastern European animation was a rare treat. For some reason, the slightly languid, restrained atmosphere of Czech or Russian cartoons seemed to have more beauty, more subtlety, more attention to detail than, I dunno, Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey. They wouldn't be shown very often on British TV - mainly because children were demanding repeats of Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey, I guess - but when they were, I was glued to the screen.

This fascination has stayed with me - things like Yuri Norstein's beautiful Hedgehog in the Fog still make my spine tingle. So, a whole hour of Russian animation on Sky Arts? This was a must-see, even if it was in their series of Russian Propaganda - the chances of me being persuaded to defect to Moscow at this stage of my life were pretty slim, not least because Moscow doesn't really want me.

The underlying messages were, perhaps predictably, rather depressing. The sequence kicked off with Someone Else's Voice, a cartoon from 1949 in which a Russian magpie, having recently returned from a trip abroad, decides that the song of the nightingale is old hat, out of fashion, and that that she can do a lot better. The woodland creatures who are self-professed fans of the nightingale turn out to see the magpie give a concert, which turns out to be a hilarious one-note approximation of jazz.

I mean, the Russians must have really struggled to create a piece of jazz quite as rotten as this - in fact, just as Les Dawson was a master of the piano and able to doodle atonally for our amusement, I strongly suspect that the Russians involved had to be secret jazz masters to have produced such a thing. The magpie is laughed out of the forest. One bird, I think it was an owl, says: "She'd better exercise her voice in lands where people like such drivel." And they go back to enjoy listening to the nightingale.

Moral of the story? That there should be an absolute ban on self-expression, on being remotely interested in new cultural developments, and all attempts to give impromptu jazz concerts should be savagely repressed.

The anti-jazz theme continued in Shooting Range, a 1971 cartoon in which an unemployed American gets a job as a live target on a shooting range, because the proprietor figures that he can prise more money out of his customers if they have a human being to shoot at. (A bit like a low-budget version of Hostel.)

In this vision of the US, the cars don't work, barely anyone has a job, those who do are so fat that they're bursting out of their ill-fitting clothing, and you can't move from A to B without being bombarded with tuneless saxophones warbling over syncopated drums, like John Coltrane on a cocktail of steroids and chicken vindaloo. Possibly true in small parts of America, but hardly endemic.

It ended with a portrayal of the church as an aggressively malign social influence, combined with a commentary on the horror of the Vietnam war. This was interspersed with grim newsreel footage that surprisingly didn't feature any mention of the brutal Russian suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, or the Czechs 12 years later. Grim. I had to go and watch Hedgehog in the Fog again, just to calm me down.

You can see more Russian Propaganda cartoons next Wednesday evening (21 November) on Sky Arts, Sky channel 267.

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