The Foundation of Media Policy Making in the Field of Animation A Study on the Iran’s Approach to Animation as a Means of Soft Power

Nowadays, media has become an essential part of modern life which can act as a bilateral intermediator between government and people; as a result they play a major role in creation or deterioration of social cohesion and solidarity. Modern communication technologies and media have also led to development of cultural products. The mass production of films and animations which are a part of cultural industries is a direct result of the technological advancement in the communication facilities. Currently, the countries that enjoy potential media facilities often plan to use mostly from their cultural ability for reaching political goals internally, and diplomatic ones at the international level. Soft power can be described as the ability to influence the behavior of the subject of the state to achieve political goals through positively impact on public opinion by using intangible resources of power such as culture and ideology. Subsequently, the concept of soft power is applied in contrast to the hard power.Recently, in Iran, the concept of soft power has been vastly debated both in political and academic circles. This line of arguments has mainly been related to national and security concerns regarding the methods of dealing with cultural invasion and soft war.Iranian government believes that the cultural invasion against Iran is aimed to make people lose their belief in Islam and revolution in order to promote division and discord in the society based on the doctrine of separation of religion from politics. As a result the danger of the soft war is considered the same as the military war. These considerations have put the cultural issues at the center of current debates regarding the security concerns of the government.Holding a series of conferences and symposiums to gather various groups of artists and cultural scholars was a natural response to the certain aspects of the necessity for utilizing the intellectual capital of the country. In his regard, the conference of National Power in the Mirror of Performing Arts with the focus on three art forms of theatre, cinema and animation, which was held in June 2014 at Tehran, was an effort to create an active discourse between Iranian cultural theoreticians and executive agents of the state. The purpose of the conference was to investigate the role of performing arts in achieving soft power and to study the proposed strategies in order to use the power of these media for promoting Iranian cultural image in a creative and non-propaganda manner. At this conference, media of animation was studied as a powerful creative tool that can be utilized for the purpose of shaping national identity and cultural cultivation of young generation.Accordingly, the aim of this article is to investigate the specifications and requirements which are needed for the Iranian animation industry to evolve into an innovative and cultural industryby studying the fundamental basis of policy making in the field of animation, and to answer to these questions that how the industry can develop into national capital that can effectively constitute state power.