The animated moving image as political cartoon

For all the technological developments that have punctuated the timeline of political cartooning, the digital media revolution has ushered in an era where cartoonists find themselves, for the first time, operating in a news-publishing context that supports both silent static images and audio-visual moving images. Animation has emerged as a vehicle that exploits both the cartoonist's customary drawing skills as well as the new-media affordances of sound and motion. Categorically acknowledged by some prize-giving institutions but not others, and accepted by some (but not all) cartoonists, the place of animation in the political cartooning tradition remains nebulous. In this article I examine and compare the material and teleological characteristics of print media political cartoons and animated political cartoons. Writing primarily from an Australian perspective, I take as my set selected works of five prominent Australian political cartoonists who have also negotiated an animation practice. I conclude that political animations diverge from printmedia political cartoons in terms of visual style, but not function. In critically reflecting on the viewpoints of prize givers, scholars and cartoonists themselves, I determine that the alignment of the two image types within a single, political cartooning tradition is not only possible in a categorical sense, but also desirable in a historical sense.