Reshaping Women’s Roles on and off the Screen: Animation during Khrushchev and Brezhnev

Stalin’s death in 1953 marks the beginning of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, which signaled a slow and uneven liberalization of the arts including animation. This liberalization and subsequent relaxation of censorship did not appear as quickly in cinema production as it did in litera1 ture, due to the time required to create a film. For this reason, innovations in animation became more common in the 1960s and 1970s, hence, this chapter covers both Khrushchev’s Thaw and the period referred to as Leonid Brezhnev’s Stagnation. After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev began a process of de-Stalinization, that is, rolling back some of