Abstract
This chapter explores aesthetic potentials of animation relating to audiovisual political communication. Throughout its history, animation—and especially the animated film—has served as a means of political propaganda or protest and dealt with political issues in fiction and non-fiction genres. However, with the advent of the “Web 2.0” the general role of media in political contexts has changed. New conditions of production, distribution and reception have contributed to the emergence of new genres specific to the Internet. Low-cost user-generated footage, circumvention of gatekeepers, global and niche audiences as well as their imminent invitation to not just watch but act have made online videos a powerful tool in political and/or activist campaigns. The chapter firstly asks in what way these changes apply to animated videos as political communication; secondly if they have also led to the emergence of innovative genres of political animation; and thirdly if the use of animation in web videos fulfills specific needs and functions that differ from those of live-action footage.
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Notes
- 1.
Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, animation is not necessarily constituted by the artificial illusion of movement that is created manually frame-by-frame, as numerous definitions throughout the history of animation suggest (Wells 1998, 10), but by the trick (Reinerth 2013, 2016). This idea, that draws a direct line between contemporary CGI and historical trick-films, was famously expressed by Scottish-Canadian animation pioneer Norman McLaren (Solomon 1987, n.p.).
- 2.
Also, it remains somewhat unclear if Wells intended them to be understood as genres proper.
- 3.
There is also a growing body of work from the perspective of animation studies that deals with the specifics of digital animation. However, most of them, too center on digital (cinema) film and television and exclude (or ignore) other modes of production. See, for example, Holliday 2018.
- 4.
YouTube—to date the most important online video platform—launched in 2005, a year after Vimeo and Facebook (both 2004), Tumblr (2007) was only a year old at the time that Hosea’s paper was published while Instagram (2010) and TikTok (2016) had not even been released.
- 5.
For some enlightening elaborations on what predestines animation for exploitation in propagandistic terms that concur with my findings, see Raiti 2007.
- 6.
- 7.
A concept Tedjasukmana and Eder are careful enough to not invoke.
- 8.
What is at stake here is nothing less than the equation of photographic realism with indexicality that is easily made but, at least in the digital era, holds little truth (Glynne 2013, 73). However, as genres are ruled not by truth but by conventions, we can very well conclude that it is a convention that witness videos and vlogs typically are not animated.
- 9.
In that, they differ from digital representations of animated archival footage (sometimes with added commentary, like in Cartoon predicts the future more than 60 years ago. This is amazing insight!, 2009) that, too, may have political content but can, in theory, belong to any of the genres discussed earlier.
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Reinerth, M.S. (2021). Political Genres of Online Animation: Genre Theory, Animation Studies, and Digital Media. In: Ritzer, I. (eds) Media and Genre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69866-9_6
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