In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing
story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats--an
animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book,
the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film
itself. The world's very first animated movie was made to solicit
donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his
earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn
from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly
demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by
scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world's richest archives of
wartime memory and witness.
Generation after generation, artists have turned to this most
fantastical of mediums to capture real-life horrors they can express in
no other way. From Chinese animators depicting the Japanese invasion of
Shanghai to Bosnian animators portraying the siege of Sarajevo, from
African animators documenting ethnic cleansing to South American
animators reflecting on torture and civil war, from Vietnam-era protest
films to the films of the French Resistance, from firsthand memories of
Hiroshima to the haunting work of Holocaust survivors, the animated
medium has for more than a century served as a visual repository for
some of the darkest chapters in human history. It is a tradition that
continues even to this day, in animated shorts made by Russian
dissidents decrying the fighting in Ukraine, American soldiers returning
from Iraq, or Middle Eastern artists commenting on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, or the ongoing crisis in
Yemen.
Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film vividly
tells the story of these works and many others, covering the full
history of animated film and spanning the entire globe. A rich, serious,
and deeply felt work of groundbreaking media history, it is also an
emotional testament to the power of art to capture the endurance of the
human spirit in the face of atrocity.
