Cartoon films can present complex matters in an often brutally simple fashion. Everybody knows in an instant how the matter stands. One theme in many animated films is the conflict between the stupid and strong, and the clever but weak who, generally speaking, comes out on top. All conceivable variations on that archaic theme, have, With variable inventiveness, populated the screen of the cartoon film. As a modern fairy tale, the cartoon is often an extremely concise social critique, or at least an ideological statement, wrapped up in an apparently innocent and amusing form. You could look at the earliest Mickey Mouse films in this way, where blacks were stereotyped in a proto racist way. Later, when public opinion changed, such blatantly racist tendencies disappeared from these films. The history of the cartoon is therefore a summary of prevailing attitudes and ideological concepts in a nutshell. The cartoon as buffoon of the rich West. Jesse Drew must have thought that when he started on this work. He brought his research into the character of the cartoon, based on shallow, coarse antitheses to a meta-plan by having read out aloud the Communist Manifest of Marx and Engels under western ideological images. The same coarse antithesis on which the medium of the cartoon is based, but which also occurs in Marx's works. As is known, Marx's theory divides society into two sectors: a ruling class with access to the means of production and the class of 'have-nots', the proletariat. Each fights the other but they are always in a state of interaction, depending on each other's role and position in the power structure. This stack of antitheses has an infectious action and recalls Marx's theory of alienation. With the removal of the threat of the cold war and the dismantling of the communist syvoice, the 'zoon politicon' seems to have evaporated in the resonance of the amusement industry's images.
– Willem van Weelden
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Text Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Voice A. Coe, Production Old Mole Productions
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