Animation Behind the Iron Curtain: A Guide to Animated Films from Russia and Eastern Bloc Countries During the Cold War Era by Cowen Eleanor (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 359 Cowen, Eleanor. Animation Behind the Iron Curtain: A Guide to Animated Films from Russia and Eastern Bloc Countries During the Cold War Era. John Libbey, New Barnet, 2020. viii + 215 pp. Map. Illustrations. Chronology of selected political events and animated films. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £24.99: $32.00 (paperback). Eleanor Cowen’s Animation Behind the Iron Curtain is a welcome book on traditional animation. In a contemporary digitalized animation world, the author’s main objective is to draw attention to traditional animation films that have not been widely available to Western audiences. As stated on the cover, the book intends to be a ‘guide to animated films from Russia and Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War era’. It comprises two parts. The first contains three chapters which briefly illustrate the main issues at stake during the Cold War years. In these introductory chapters, Cowen gives some simplified background information about the positions of the two states involved — capitalist USA versus Communist Soviet Union. The second part focuses on Eastern Bloc animation and dedicates each chapter to a specific area: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. For each country Cowen describes a selection of directors and films and briefly defines some of their key animation techniques. The book offers neither an in-depth study of animation of the Cold War, nor a thorough analysis of issues of representation and propaganda, but instead aims to spotlight exemplary films made in the Soviet Bloc. The context provided serves as a rudimentary introduction to the Cold War as well as to animation techniques. The overall structure of the book is not always linear. The division of chapters in the first part, which attempts to introduce the Eastern and Western Blocs, leads to a few repetitions; while the second part has a tendency to digress, giving snippets of historical fact or explanations of animation techniques, which divert the focus of the discussion. The historical background is rather simplistic and, at times, only vaguely relevant to the films in question, but it might nevertheless be helpful for students utterly unfamiliar with the context. Cowen’s descriptions of animation techniques are presented more as an aside than an integral part of her discussion of the development of national film production. The techniques she examines are cel animation, stop-motion, paper cutout, rotoscoping, sand animation, editing, transition, narrative structure, plaster panel technique, mise-en-scène and sound design. While a brief introduction to these techniques might be welcomed by students not versed in film studies, a more harmonious discussion of their significance in relation to Cowen’s film selection would have resulted in a more compelling SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 360 treatment of the cartoons. Moreover, rather than being analysed, the films are mostly delineated by plot details and only a few general aesthetic characteristics. Instead of a conclusion, the book presents a chronological table of selected political events, Western animation and Eastern Bloc animation. This chronology serves as a useful tool for locating the films in time and reorganizing the contextual information in a linear way. The chronology is accompanied by a map of Europe showing the division of the countries before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The map would presumably be valuable for students, especially non-European, unfamiliar with the geography of the region, and perhaps it would have sufficed to portray each country’s location visually in this way without the superfluous descriptions at the beginning of each chapter. Lastly, the reader might wish to know the method Cowen used to choose the films featured in the book. Most of them are unquestionably representative of some of the tendencies in each country, but the selection criteria adopted are not made clear. In the first part, Cowen selects only a few films that illustrate the main stances of the two sides of the Iron Curtain, while many other propaganda films go unmentioned. The same can be said for the discussion of animation in each country; quite a few influential masters are neglected and important films ignored. However, the book does not claim to offer a comprehensive study of Eastern...