Animation lends itself readily to propaganda

Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by Saudi troops in a computer-animated film of the ‘liberation’ of Iran from Ayatollah rule. Saudi Deterrent Force was a six-minute fantasy released online by anonymous video-makers in Saudi Arabia in 2017. It was viewed over 750,000 times before Iranian animators struck back with Battle of the Persian Gulf II, in which the Great Satan and perceived Saudi lackey Donald Trump is humiliated in an imagined Gulf battle led by Soleimani.

Now that Soleimani is, in Pentagon-speak, a ‘vaporised non-person’, Saudi Deterrent Force acquires added interest for us as propaganda. Large parts of the Sunni world loathed Soleimani and his Shia Muslim entourage and indeed celebrated his death by drone. (One Lebanese political scientist even tweeted that President Trump should run for office in a Sunni-majority Arab country.) In her scholarly guide to the vagaries of war and animated film, Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary, Donna Kornhaber considers the anti-Iranian video in all its cartoonal intent to validate Saudi aggression (if not Sunni jihadism) against a feared Shia crescent of influence in the Middle East.