Les représentations de l’ennemi et du combat dans les dessins animés soviétiques de 1941

Abstract

World War II had a considerable impact on the cultural production of countries implicated in conflict, what notably reverberated in the visual propaganda supporting political discourse. In front of the largeness of threat, the Soviet authorities did not hesitate to mobilize artistic community to relay a patriotic discourse to the masses, casting a particular picture of the enemy as well as behaviours to adopt in front of him, in the same way as France, Great Britain or the United States could make it. The cartoons which were produced in 1941, according to the invasion of the Soviet territory by the German army, include some themes linked to the representation of the enemy and of the battle into a double perspective of military pedagogy and creation of a fantasy of victory. Picturing the enemy as an animal in cartoons, as well as the distortion of reality in the sequences of battle, are so much means to create a sentiment of hate, facing the invader, and to control information from the front lines to reassure the population on the holding of hostilities.

Keywords

• Cartoons
• political discourse.
• Propaganda
• Soviet Union
• World War II