Tim here. It's the first of May, and of course that can only mean one thing! ...oh, right, the new Avengers opens. Yeah, it means that too. But the thing is, the whole internet is going to be around to talk about Avengers: Age of Ultron, all weekend and probably all next week, and by then it will be time to talk about its sequels and spin-offs till the heat death of the universe.
So for right now, it's May Day, or International Workers Day for the anarcho-socialists in the crowd. Sort of like Labor Day's burlier, more aggressively political sibling, it's the kind of holiday that can only be celebrated in one way: animated Soviet propaganda! So please, won't you join me on a brief tour of some of the best - or at least, the most interesting - snippets of propagandistic Soviet cartoons? I promise that it's fascinatingly weird...
...though I would be a liar to promise that it's as-such "good".
For if there's one thing that I adore and like to try to force on an unwilling audience every now and then, it's Soviet animation, which is sort of the funhouse mirror version of American animation; the same sense of cartoon physics applies, and it's just as goofy, and clearly meant to be light entertainment, except that it's unrelentingly grim and overladen with a sense of existential horror even when it's at its frothiest. You know, the way Russians do.
Soviet Toys (1924)
Directed by the legendary documentarian Dziga Vertov, of the masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, this is perhaps the first animated film in Russian cinema. Certainly, it is the oldest that still exists.
Made in the era when Soviet art was still okay with graphic experimentation and heavy symbolism, the film's satire targets the NEPmen, middle managers who found a way to wedge a form of bare-bones capitalism into the fledgling Soviet Union during the era of the New Economic Policy. That explains the opening with its rotund caricature of a selfish, devouring businessman - one of the most ancient and reliable of Communist visual gags - but the rest of the film quickly turns into a cryptic, though nonetheless mesmerising, blend of motion and articulated line drawings. It's as primitive as any animation could have been in '24, but used in such an abstract way that it's beautiful in its own way.
Fascist Boots on Our Homeland (1941)
Anti-Nazi cartooning of a sort that puts even some of the most blunt American propaganda from the period to shame: sketching Hitler as a mad boar goes beyond simple caricature.
Seriously, even by propaganda standards, that's not subtle. But there's artfulness to it even so: the speed and stretchiness of the animation is impressively fluid for something cranked out so quickly, and there are flashes of the pure graphical approach to art - in the inky black explosions, or the almost holy lighting behind the initials CCCP - that recalls the more formalist Soviet cinema that was out of favor under Stalin.
We Can Do It (1970)
Anti-American, pro-pacifism from the heart of the Vietnam War era; the nationalist logic underpinning it is surely self-serving, but the craftsmanship isn't. This is one of the peaks of Russian animation.
The clean, expressive line drawing characters against solid color backdrops looks back all the way to the earliest animation (glance back up to Soviet Toys, won't you?), but there's infinitely more grace and sophistication to the linework, and the gliding smoothness of the animation is as lovely as the drawings themselves. And even though the smug anti-Western foundation for the film's message goes down poorly, the argument that warfare is an international, multi-ethnic and pan-religious concern cuts a lot deeper than it seems that it should. If flat-out propaganda can ever be art, this surely meets that threshold.