10 votes

World War Two animated: Western Front 1940

6 comments

  1. [5]
    cfabbro
    Link
    For those interested, Eastory just released an incredible 1hr video combining all the clips he produced for WW2 in Real Time along with the original narration from Indy Neidell: WW2 in animated...

    For those interested, Eastory just released an incredible 1hr video combining all the clips he produced for WW2 in Real Time along with the original narration from Indy Neidell:

    WW2 in animated maps: Sept 1939 - Aug 1940

    p.s. Since I know this is a somewhat niche interest I decided to make this comment here rather than submit a totally new topic

    1 vote
    1. [4]
      onyxleopard
      Link Parent
      I tried watching some of this and I couldn’t stand it. The speaker’s affectation is like that of a sportscaster, which I believe is wholly inappropriate for this sort of content. The speaker...

      I tried watching some of this and I couldn’t stand it. The speaker’s affectation is like that of a sportscaster, which I believe is wholly inappropriate for this sort of content. The speaker flourishes the descriptions of military advances as if describing the actions of sports teams. This seems to trivialize the enormous toll WW2 had on the lives of the soldiers and civilians who were involved. I suppose some might find the content boring if it were narrated in a more somber or neutral tone, but the incongruity of affectation and the reality of what is being described totally turned me off of this. I find it bizarre that people delight in the fine-grained dissection of the military strategy and abstraction of military units to numbered squares overlaid on maps. It’s amazing the level of detail portrayed, but at the same time, not something I could stand to watch all the way through unless I muted it and turned on the closed captions.

      1 vote
      1. [3]
        cfabbro
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        I can see why you would think that... but IMO it's a somewhat unfair take on it since you're basing that opinion entirely on the video I linked, which is essentially just a montage of all the very...

        This seems to trivialize the enormous toll WW2 had on the lives of the soldiers and civilians who were involved.

        I can see why you would think that... but IMO it's a somewhat unfair take on it since you're basing that opinion entirely on the video I linked, which is essentially just a montage of all the very short segments that were originally part of much longer episodes on WW2 that didn't trivialize the death toll at all, and in fact often went out of their way to focus on the atrocities and devastation it wreaked at the human level. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5YhhNcC44&list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4cwI-ZuDoBLxVEV3egWKoM

        To be fair to you, that's probably largely my fault for not really explaining the context of the video well enough before linking to it though, so sorry about that.

        1 vote
        1. [2]
          onyxleopard
          Link Parent
          Yeah, I guess it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t summarize well. The enormity of some things can’t be condensed without losing the essence of them. At the same time, portrayals of WW2 in popular...

          Yeah, I guess it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t summarize well. The enormity of some things can’t be condensed without losing the essence of them. At the same time, portrayals of WW2 in popular media tend to circumvent this by focusing on particular individuals or small groups, and that tends to ignore the larger scope which this series definitely does not ingore.

          1 vote
          1. cfabbro
            (edited )
            Link Parent
            Yeah, and I think, as you touched on in your previous comment, there is also the element of trying to make it exciting enough to hold people's interest as well, which further complicates things......

            Yeah, and I think, as you touched on in your previous comment, there is also the element of trying to make it exciting enough to hold people's interest as well, which further complicates things... especially on YouTube, where audiences are often rather fickle and can have short attention spans. But all in all, I think The Great War (in Real Time), TimeGhost (Between Two Wars) , and World War Two (in Real Time), the primary channels behind the project, have done a pretty decent job of covering these subjects for the YouTube audience, without getting too abstracted away from the human suffering aspect of everything.

            1 vote