A recent parliamentary push to ban the Russian cartoon 'Masha and the Bear' highlights the long-standing use of animated media as propaganda, revealing its impact on children's perceptions.
London, United Kingdom Jul 15, 2026 ALN: When Liberal Democrat MP Tom Gordon spoke earlier this month in the House of Commons about the "militarisation of children," he was not warning of a generation suddenly taking arms. Instead, he was referring to a cartoon bear. Gordon, along with a cross-party group of more than 50 MPs, wrote a parliamentary letter urging that the animated children’s show be banned, claiming it is Russian propaganda.
The accused animation is Masha and the Bear, a Russian programme aimed at preschoolers. The show is one of the most popular series on YouTube and is available in the UK on ITVX and Netflix. It follows the adventures of the young, pink-hooded Masha and her brown bear companion in a remote woodland. However, MPs, along with Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation and Estonia’s minister for foreign affairs, see Masha’s use of Soviet-era military costumes as a flex of Russian “soft power.”
Cartoons as propaganda have a century-long history. The earliest examples can be traced back to the First World War, according to David Welch, emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Kent. “All belligerents employed them,” he says. One of the most prominent British animators in 1914 was Lancelot Speed, whose “lightning sketches” featured him drawing ridiculous caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm II haunted by ghosts, wearing dresses, and being turned into a sausage. “These proved hugely popular with cinema audiences,” Welch adds.
However, the use of propaganda cartoons exploded during the Second World War. Welch notes that the stretchy and slapstick cartoon characters in the slowly maturing animation industry were perfect for the humour-led propaganda films of the early 1940s. “The boom was also due to technological advances in animated film production and the rise of specific global companies, mainly in the USA, devoted to such productions,” he explains.
Some of the biggest animation studios at the time contributed to hand-drawn agitprop: Warner Brothers produced The Ducktators, depicting Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo as maladjusted mallards who end up stuffed above a mantelpiece. In Daffy – The Commando (1943), a rotoscoped Adolf Hitler gives a speech before Daffy Duck promptly whacks him on the head with a mallet.
Disney also played a significant role in the US war effort, producing several cartoon propaganda films for the government. The most famous was the Oscar-winning Der Fuehrer’s Face, in which Donald Duck has a nightmare that he lives in Nazi Germany. In one section, Donald reaches the point of exhaustion after repeatedly Sieg Heiling dozens of portraits of Hitler. After waking from his dream, he kisses a figurine of the Statue of Liberty and proclaims: “Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America!”
Many of these US wartime films featured racist caricatures and insults. Bugs Bunny appeared in a now-banned Warner Brothers cartoon titled Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, where the iconic rabbit used multiple racial slurs.
The Axis powers also produced films for their own audiences. Fascist Italy released Il Dottor Churkill in 1941, depicting a hairy, sharp-toothed Winston Churchill as a Jekyll and Hyde monster who plunders gold from people at home and abroad. In 1943, under the orders of Nazi Germany, Nimbus Libéré was released in Vichy France to portray a potential Allied invasion as dangerous, featuring an antisemitic caricature in London ordering cartoon icons like Mickey Mouse and Popeye to bomb a family.
As capitalism and communism clashed during the Cold War, propaganda shifted to differences in ideology rather than sheer military might. Britain’s first animated feature film, Animal Farm (1954), was marred by political influence, albeit more covertly. Decades after its release, it was discovered that the adaptation of George Orwell’s tale was funded by the CIA. The film famously diverted from the novel’s original ending, hinting at support for the overthrow of communist governments.
While there have been some heavy-handed outliers, such as the environmentally conscious Captain Planet and the Planeteers, cartoons with overt messaging took a break by the end of the 20th century. However, with the advent of digital animation software in the 2000s, individuals began producing their own propagandistic cartoons without state-subsidised studios.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the internet was flooded with support for US intervention in the Middle East through crude animations of Osama bin Laden made in Adobe Flash. Many featured 2D versions of the al-Qaida founder being shot, tortured, and mocked. In one widely shared animation released a month after the attacks, a pixelated Colin Powell sings a parody of Harry Belafonte’s song Banana Boat, pleading: “Come Mr Taliban, hand over Bin Laden.” Meanwhile, George W. Bush plays the bongos as the Saudi-born militant dodges a barrage of missiles.
Both sides have utilized cartoons at various points. While better known for publishing graphic recordings of beheadings, the Islamic State briefly produced child-friendly animations disseminated over YouTube and Telegram.
This lowering financial barrier to animated propaganda eventually began to blend with the explosion of online meme culture. Murdoch Murdoch, a far-right cartoon series that began in 2015, revels in open racism, misogyny, and Nazi ideology, created using pre-existing internet memes on forums like 4chan.
The last 15 years have seen an uptick in war cartoons. Kristián Földes, a lecturer and academic researcher at Charles University, Prague, studied animated propaganda during the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and found that both sides reacted to one another through cartoon counter-propaganda. “They anthropomorphise states into children, using victim-perpetrator or hero-villain narrative arcs, combining fictional stories with real-life events,” he explains.
Recently, the cost of cartoon warfare has plummeted. After the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, the Iranian digital media company Explosive Media used generative AI to create Lego Movie-style animations in support of Iran. One video features plastic versions of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu paired with the devil, while another shows a toy Iranian commander rapping insults to the US; both were widely shared on social media.
These pro-Iran videos fall into a fledgling category of propaganda termed “slopaganda,” defined by its use of generative AI. Michał Klincewicz, an assistant professor of computational cognitive science at Tilburg University, coined the term in an academic paper. While most slopaganda is text-based, Klincewicz notes that cartoons excel at communicating emotions rather than facts. “[The] videos would not have worked so well if they were realistic depictions,” he states.
Földes agrees, stating, “Our current infrastructure is designed to verify or falsify factual claims, not narratives and stories.” He notes that while Masha and her bear may exhibit propagandistic elements episodically, further study is needed to determine if they are indeed propagandists.
Whether Masha and the Bear will remain on screens is yet to be decided. While propagandists will likely continue to thrive online, it raises the question: will the eraser finally come for their cartoons? Klincewicz believes not. “The idea is to deliver a message in a form that is more familiar, less threatening, or that elicits affective responses,” he explains. “So if we see a cartoon of a death camp kapo as a pig, as opposed to a realistic human being, we get a particular association. I don’t see that changing any time soon.”
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