The influence of the Cold War on the transformation of the image of the enemy in Soviet animation

The subject of this research is the evolution of the image of the enemy in Soviet animation from the 1940s to the 1980s in the context of the cultural dynamics of the Cold War. The work relies on an interdisciplinary approach that combines methods of cultural history, film analysis, and the history of ideology, as well as comparative methods, historical content analysis, and the systematization and synthesis of data; the image of the enemy is understood as a social construct whose transformation is traced through animated films, archival documents, authors' memories, and scientific publications. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that Soviet animation is examined for the first time as a path from straightforward political caricature to an aesthetic code, in which hostility was reinterpreted as a universal anthropological problem. The author concludes that from the 1940s to the 1980s, there was a consistent change in representations of the enemy—from external (the West, imperialism) to internal (the bourgeois, the bureaucrat) and then to their merger in a philosophical parable. It has been established that the Cold War affected animation primarily through changes in the function of artistic form rather than through thematic limitations. The identified patterns allow us to assert that Soviet animation served as a sensitive indicator of the cultural changes of the era, reflecting the gradual shift of ideological conflict from the realm of direct propaganda to the domain of artistic forms. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that Soviet animation is examined for the first time as a path from straightforward political caricature to an aesthetic code, in which hostility was reinterpreted as a universal anthropological problem. The author concludes that from the 1940s to the 1980s, there was a consistent change in representations of the enemy—from external (the West, imperialism) to internal (the bourgeois, the bureaucrat) and then to their merger in a philosophical parable. It has been established that the Cold War affected animation primarily through changes in the function of artistic form rather than through thematic limitations.