China in Flames

One of the first Soviet animated films, 1925: China in revolt, the West as a fat capitalist, the Chinese worker as a figure who will not stay down. A collaboration among the earliest Moscow animators (among them Nikolai Khodataev and Zenon Komissarenko), cut-out and drawn, made in the years when the Comintern still believed the Chinese revolution was tomorrow. It is crude, beautiful, and completely sure of itself. The flames are the point. So is the fact that Soviet animation learned to speak on someone else's war.