Context of Practice - Politics & Propaganda

Politics and propaganda come hand in hand when talking about them together. The purpose of propaganda is to promote political agendas and in a sense act as a link to the public through visuals presented to them in the form of propaganda. However, seeing this relationship on a deeper more analytical level was interesting and it made me realise the amount of propaganda that existed that I had never heard about.

Something we looked at during the seminar was the use of propaganda, incorporated into the animation medium. Of course, like most people, I was aware of various uses and examples of propaganda during war time, and had encountered it multiple times. But when it came to some of the animations we were shown, I was unaware that they had existed prior to the introduction to them during the seminar. The idea of using animation as a form of propaganda during world war II for example makes sense. The medium was relatively new and considered quite innovative, as well as this it reached out to a broad audience, children included. We looked at an piece of animated propaganda produced by Disney in 1943, Der Fuehrer's Face. The piece itself was quite interesting as it had a very extreme themes in it, or what I would consider extreme by today's standards. I imagine based on the fact that it is an animation produced by Disney that the main target audience for it was children, at the time of course, people probably recognised the fact that it was propaganda atleast that it was aimed to tell a story based around Hitler and how 'evil' he was.

After this, we watched several other pieces that were made to act as propaganda and persuade audiences to adapt to a political regime. The topics they cover of course, would have been much more intense and relevant at the time they were shown, whereas now we are watching them many years later, they are quite clearly propaganda and make no effort to disguise this. Overall they would have had a much different effect at the time. This is the same for all propaganda though, during the time of its release it's relevant and seamless, whereas years later when political regimes change, you notice how bias and manipulative it's trying to be.