Salute Your Shorts: Red Cartoons

Earlier this week, First Run Features released a DVD titled Red Cartoon: Animated Films from East Germany, which led me to ask the question, “There was animated film production in East Germany?” The only mention I’d ever heard of such a thing before this set was The Simpsons’ bleak “Worker and Parasite,” which always seemed more like a good joke than any sort of parody. It’s just one of those odd corners of world cinema that’s been neglected here in the States and, like a lot of those, has gems that make hunting them out worth the effort.

East Germany had its own film history quite apart from what happened in the rest of the country following World War II. Before the war, Weimar cinema was one of the most respected in the world, rivaling both American and French productions in both quality and quantity. Although few of these still remain, much of what’s left are masterpieces by Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Georg Wilhelm Pabst and even Billy Wilder. But with the rise of the Nazi movement, most of the top talent at Germany’s Ufa studios fled to the United States. The best story about this period is that Joseph Goebbels was so impressed with Lang’s Metropolis that he offered Lang the position of heading up his propaganda film unit, to which Lang responded by leaving the country the next day.  How true this actually is nobody knows, but it is a pretty great story.

This exodus of talent was not limited just to directors but also included producers, screenwriters, actors and others. The decades following the war were rough for German film for a number of reasons and the country’s national cinema didn’t regain international acclaim until the rise of New German Cinema in the late '60s. But meanwhile, apart from the rest of the country the East German film industry (after a rough few years) forged its own history and continued working in a State-controlled film production unit in the Soviet Zone of Berlin. The new company was DEFA and it took advantage of the former UFA studios and began production, in many ways an island unto itself in the world of film.

During its roughly 50 years of production, DEFA produced around 900 feature films and over 3000 documentaries. In a separate unit from the main studio at DEFA was DEFA Studio for Animation Film, which produced more than 800 films during its run. Of course, these were produced under the Communist Regime of East Germany and as such were never screened in America until just recently. A large number of these films still exist and, if First Run’s DVDs are any indication, are surprisingly well-preserved.

Universally short and frequently made for children though they may be, the cartoons produced under DEFA were just as ideologically determined as everything else made in the state. Bertolt Brecht explained the issues of DEFA by saying, “DEFA has all sorts of problems finding subjects, especially contemporary ones. The head office lists significant themes: underground movement, distribution of land, two-year-plan, the new man, etc. - then writers are supposed to devise stories that interpret the theme and its associated problems. This naturally often goes wrong." They’re theme-based works rather than character-based and these themes are generally blunt and hard to misunderstand.

Given this production method, it’s no surprise that the East German cartoons are highly political and almost universally didactic, though they’re not the type of propagandistic claptrap you might expect. Some are quite the opposite, in fact. In “Belly and Soul,” a communist politician is depicted as mind-bogglingly boring while the officials waiting behind him are revealed to be cardboard cut-outs. When he gives the stage up to a pianist playing his heart out, the audience who sat in rapt attention to his nattering spends his performance sneaking away to steal a banquet being served after the show. The audience of Communist-loving politicos is portrayed as a group with no respect for the arts or other human beings. It’s not a short that you’d expect to see under a state-controlled regime, and much of its power draws from the way it so boldly bucks authority.

One of my favorite films from the set is “The Solution.” It has a line of birds all facing to the left under the instructions of a large bird to the far left. At the back of the line, one of the birds moves off and faces right. He’s immediately snitched on by one of the others and the large, commander bird goes back and scolds him. This repeats and the bird beats him. It repeats again, and again, and the large bird doesn’t know what to do about the situation. He can’t control someone defying authority, but he has nothing else to do. His answer to this problem is to fly to the other end of the line and have all of the birds face right. As the credits to the short roll, the bird at the back of line turns to face the wrong direction again.

The film’s brief parable illustrates the anti-authoritarian strain of the films, many of which follow suit. An oddity of DEFA is that this sort of message was almost encouraged. While I can’t imagine this theme in itself being asked for by the company, rules for DEFA filmmaking required films to be message rather than formally motivated. Clearly, many of the filmmakers were able to insert their own messages rather than state-controlled ones.

Most of the DEFA shorts have at least some overt political slant, but much of this is less about the communist state than about the unfortunate situation East Germany found itself in. One of the more obvious but still amusing of these shorts is “Variants,” in which two neighbors sharing the same duplex fight over who has to clean up rubbish polluting their land. The short ends a bit on the literal side, with the neighbors throwing garbage over a wall into each other’s yards, but this doesn’t hurt the piece.

An easily discernible message without too much depth ends up being both the charm and the failing of nearly all of the shorts. As much as I love short films, which is clearly quite a lot, there’s not too much you can do in less than five minutes beyond visual invention and a simple parable. As a group, there is no shortage of this, with a variety of stylization even within individual directors’ works that’s impressive (the set is heavily skewed towards works by Otto Sacher and Klaus Georgi), while we can only get hints of the despair being felt by the creators living through East Germany’s slow meltdown.

That being said, a number of these films will stick with you, despite how universal and easy to grasp their messages are. “The Monument” is a defining statement on the way masses blindly follow leadership, and “Star and Flower” is one of the more poetic takes of the classic the-grass-is-always-greener-on-the-other-side tales put to film. What they lack in depth, the Red Cartoons make up in the insight of their observations—you’ve heard these lessons before, but probably not told this well.