Early this month in the United Kingdom, a debate over ‘militarization of children’ erupted, sparked by a single bear. The bear appears in the popular animated series for children <Masha and the Bear>, which is airing on platforms including Netflix.

<Masha and the Bear> follows a young girl, Masha, and her friend, a brown bear, as they have adventures in a remote forest. Criticism centered on Masha and her clothing, as well as the symbolism attached to the bear. The bear is a prominent symbol of Russia, and the hat Masha puts on to drive away a rabbit that tries to steal the carrot patch belonging to the bear was also said to evoke Soviet-era military uniforms.

More than 50 cross-party MPs, including Liberal Democrat MP Tom Gordon, submitted a letter to Parliament urging a broadcast ban, arguing the work appears to be Russian propaganda. The Center for Countering Disinformation in Ukraine and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia also expressed concern.

On the 15th (local time), the British daily the Guardian highlighted the more than 100-year history of cartoons and animation being used as tools of political and wartime propaganda.

The origins of propaganda cartoons go back to World War I. David Welch, emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Kent, said, “All belligerent countries used cartoons at the time,” adding that works that made a mockery of enemy nations enjoyed great popularity. A representative example is a work by the renowned British animator Lancelot Speed depicting Kaiser Wilhelm II in a ridiculous form transformed into a sausage.

Propaganda cartoons grew explosively around World War II. In the early 1940s, when characters with exaggerated, slapstick motions and long, swinging limbs were in vogue, the animation industry was well suited to producing entertainment-driven propaganda. The rise during this period of major studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. also played a part.

At the time, Warner Bros. produced <The Ducktators>, which portrayed Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo as ducks who cannot get along with their peers. In the end, the ducks wind up as stuffed specimens set on a mantelpiece.

Disney in particular is known for producing several propaganda animations for the U.S. government. A representative work is <Der Fuehrer's Face>, which won an Academy Award. In it, Donald Duck has a nightmare about living in Nazi Germany. After repeatedly giving Nazi-style salutes to dozens of portraits of Hitler, Donald Duck becomes exhausted, then wakes from the dream, kisses a model of the Statue of Liberty, and shouts, “I am truly glad to be a citizen of America.”

Many propaganda animations made in the United States during this period portrayed specific races in discriminatory and insulting ways. In the now-banned Warner Bros. short <Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips>, derogatory expressions targeting Japanese people were used.

Propaganda cartoons were not used only by the Allies. In 1941, Italy under the Axis produced the animation <Doctor Churchill>, which portrayed former British prime minister Winston Churchill as a villain with heavy fur and sharp teeth. An animation produced by the Vichy regime, the collaborationist government in southern France under Nazi control, depicts the Allied landings as a catastrophe; it even shows American cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Popeye bombing people.

During the Cold War, propaganda cartoons shifted focus from simple military clashes to ideological confrontation. <Animal Farm>, produced in 1954 as the first animated feature made in the United Kingdom, ends with the farm animals rising up against the pigs and succeeding, unlike the original novel by George Orwell. This was interpreted as hinting at the overthrow of communist regimes. It later emerged that the work was produced with funding from the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Since the 2000s, the use of cartoons for wartime propaganda has continued. A recent example came during the U.S.-Iran war, when Iran used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to produce videos portraying U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as villains and circulated them on social media.

Kristian Foldes, a lecturer and researcher at Charles University in the Czech Republic, said, “War-related animation has increased over the past 15 years.” He analyzed the Russia-Ukraine war as follows: “Both countries personify the state as a child, use narrative structures of victim and perpetrator, hero and villain, and sometimes combine fictional stories with real events.”

Since the advent of generative AI, critics say so-called ‘sloppaganda’ (sloppaganda) is spreading through cartoons and animation familiar to children. The term refers to the mass production of low-quality content using AI to agitate the public. Foldes pointed out that the social media algorithms that now serve as key channels for the spread of propaganda align especially well with visual, cartoon-centric content compared with text.