The World Witnessed: Ukrainian Animation at Times of War

• In Event: Struggle for Liberation: Perception of the Russo-Ukrainian War in Ukraine

Abstract

Within the past decade and especially since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the topic of war became dominant in Ukrainian animation. The stories told by Ukrainian animation directors differ in content, yet they all deal with the trauma of war. This presentation will analyze five films—Olha Havrylova’s The War That Changed Rondo (2020), Sofiia Mel’nyk’s Mariupol. A Hundred Nights (2023), Anna Dudko’s Mokosh (2023), Anastasiia Falileyeva’s I died in Irpin’ (2024), and Mykyta Lys’kov’s Putler Kaput (2022)—each of which bears witness to the experience of the war.
Olha Havrylova’s film The War That Changed Rondo is an adaptation of the eponymous children’s book, and thus is not directly related to Olha’s immediate experience. Yet, for her, the war was integral to her life: living in Ukraine, she was influenced by what was going on in one of the parts of the country. Her film is the testimony to the spatial and communal changes that war brings, and her exploration of the war landscape is as a part of the iconography of war as an attempt to communicate the anxiety of the destruction caused by the war. Similarly to Havrilova’s film, Sofiia Mel’nyk’s Mariupol. A Hundred Nights is an adaptation of a media source—a piece of news about a four-year-old girl who was separated from her mother in Mariupol during the bombing. And yet, it is also a personal story of Mel’nyk’s loss—the loss of the city she will not be able to see and work in. Anna Dudko’s abstract film Mokosh is an expression of fear and depression, as well as nostalgia for the peaceful materiality destroyed by the war. It is also an expression of hope amid darkness. Anastasiia Falileyeva’s I died in Irpin’ (2024) is the most personal and narrative film. Here, Falileyeva tells her story of escaping Irpin’ right before it was occupied by the Russian troops. Mykyta Lys’kov’s Putler Kaput is a collective project, a chorus of voices orchestrated by Lys’kov that unite in their desire to exterminate Putin as the president who unleashed the war on Ukraine causing death and destruction. From animators and general publics, Lys’kov solicited short animated sequences in which Putin dies in various ways. He curated them and produced his anti-war film that expresses a collective anger about the full-scale invasion as well as reflects on it through the animated imagery.
By bearing witness to the war, these films, in Roy Brand’s terms, “attempt to make experience communicable, that is to bring it back to life by reconnecting it with the whole person or the community” (2008, 205), which makes them essential not only for understanding the trauma of war but also for opening a communal conversation about this trauma. This presentation will introduce and analyze these films in terms of their aesthetics, narrative, and the conditions of production.
Bibliography:
Roy Brand, “Witnessing Trauma on Film,” in Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski, eds., Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Author

• Olga Blackledge