Quick Animation
(Quick Animation)
Quick Animation© DEFA-Stiftung
Steisinger, Gábor |
Synopsis
Scenes of a big (American?) city—crowded streets, police, garbage—morph into alienated settings forefronting graffiti, Hip-Hop and Rap music. The score is music by Bobo (who worked with Rammstein in later years) and Alexander Morawitz (Electric b). Both musicians were part of the 1980s GDR Rap scene, which was considered an unwanted influence from the West and was under Stasi surveillance.
Director Gábor Steisinger was part of the last generation of DEFA animators and Quick Animation was one of the last animation films produced at the studio. Because of rapid changes in the structure of GDR film distribution after the fall of the Wall, the film was never released in East Germany.
Although the director saw his film as a social critique, the use of racist and offensive gender characterizations achieves the opposite effect. The film’s racist stereotypes of African-American characters—such as hyper-sexualization and criminality—and use of monkey-like features reminiscent of blackface recall the offensive imagery of Disney animation films of the 1930s and ‘40s. Although the GDR supported international solidarity and was against racism and sexism, the official approval of the script and the film itself shows how problematic the social confrontation with these issues was in practice.