translated by: Margalit Rodgers

This issue of Maarav is a direct continuation of the exhibition “The Return of…” which showed at the Center for Digital Art in December 2018 and January 2019, and engaged with animation as a possibility for action in the world of contemporary art. As in the past, this issue facilitates further discussion on the exhibition’s topics, and expands them to additional realms that were not necessarily addressed in the exhibition.

This compilation includes texts by four writers, and a series of images created by artist Sharon Fadida (Including the cover image). Raz Greenberg writes about the Fleischer Brothers, who founded an animation studio in the early twentieth century, and were somewhat forgotten in the shadow cast by Walt Disney. I conducted an interview with Max Epstein, founder of Wild Kids Animation Studio, which engages with animation as an educational tool, and Nitay and Aharon who are students at the studio. Dina Yakerson writes a personal interpretation of the animation films she was exposed to during her childhood in Russia, and which she revisits later in her life; on the profound content emerging from the Soviet animation films, and how they shaped her consciousness. Nimrod Reshef writes about superheroes and the role they played as a propaganda tool in service of different countries.

The name “Animato” is the Latin word from which the word “animation” originates. The possibility of giving the illusion of life to inanimate material has been at the very heart of cinematic endeavor since its very beginnings. As Max Epstein says in the interview published in this issue, “Animation is a tool that’s very characteristic of our time, and reflects the pace of information flow, and the quantity of images from everywhere – from the internet to the schools. While we were busy doing, we discovered that this is the language of the twenty-first century, and children really should speak it”.

In addition, an interview with Hadas Kedar by Anna Bromley and Ofri Lapid is published with this issue, as part of the project “German and Israeli Perspectives to Public Presence.”