07.09 | 18:00 | IZONE ground floor

The presented monograph regards the history and contemporaneity of animated film through a prism of the ideological entanglement of this medium. The editors have invited film scholars and critics to reflect upon the dangerous liaisons between animation art and official propaganda. Regardless of their ideological backbones, propaganda messages produced by the 20 th and 21 st century political systems were based upon rather similar theoretical and methodological assumptions. Intrinsically symbolic and synthetic language of animated film allows to observe rhetorical modes and indoctrination strategies in their purest form. The authors of the collected papers study animated production against the background of historical and political contexts that include: Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, USA and Eastern European satellite countries during Cold War, Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia and its dramatic breakup, contemporary condition of European integration. The contributors represent cultural diversity and differentiated research approaches as they come from various academic and cultural environments (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, China, Greece/Estonia, Russia/USA, Bulgaria/Canada, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Sweden). Next to the papers written by the scholars of highly acknowledged status in worldwide Animation Studies (e.g. Mikhail Gurevich, Midhat Ajanović Ajan), we publish articles of the young generation of academics and film culture activists (e.g. Anna Ida Orosz, Jiří Neděla), as well as a manifesto of Theodore Ushev.

Editors: Olga Bobrowska, Michał Bobrowski, Bogusław Zmudziński

Contributors: Midhat Ajanović Ajan// Milen Alempijević// Olga Bobrowska// Michał Bobrowski// Guo Chunning// Mikhail Gurevich// Vassilis Kroustallis// Magdalena Krzosek-Hołody// Michał Mróz// Jiří Neděla// Anna Ida Orosz// Theodore Ushev// Bogusław Zmudziński

Speaker:

Michał Bobrowski. Lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities at the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. In 2010 he obtained PhD in Film Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. In 2012 he published a book “Akira Kurosawa: The Artist of the Borderlands”. In 2016 he co-edited a monograph “Obsession. Perversion. Rebellion. Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation” and in 2019 a second volume in this series entitled “Propaganda, Ideology, Animation. Twisted Dreams of History”. He is a Programme Director and a co-founder of StopTrik International Film Festival (Slovenia/Poland), an event dedicated to stop motion animation. He works with various European festivals and cinema institutions as a curator, educator and cultural activist. He wrote many academic and popular articles devoted to classic Japanese, American and East European cinema as well as animation.