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Read this book, and summarize what each chapter talks about.In addition, find which parts of the book can relate to these ideas:· Animated documentaries can go beyond words and visualize memories, using animation to embody emotions and events that cannot be expressed in actual footage.(psychological, mental space)· Animated documentaries can travel through history and predict the future because animation is not limited by time and can depict any era or imagined future era.· Animated documentaries can capture real-world events or situations beyond the capability and reach of cameras, such as war zones, or due to the limitation of accessibility
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Animated Documentary
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Animated Documentary
Annabelle Honess Roe
© Annabelle Honess Roe 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries
ISBN 978-1-349-43709-2
ISBN 978-1-137-01746-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137017468
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managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Contents
List of Figures
vi
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction
Animation and documentary’s shared history
Scope and organisation
1
5
13
1 Representational Strategies
How animation is used in animated documentary
The ontology of animated documentary
17
22
27
2 Digital Realities
Dino-docs and strategies of visual and aural authentication
Tracing the sights and sounds of reality in
Rotoshop and Chicago 10
Paratextual authentication
The excess of animated realism
41
45
55
65
67
3 Animated Interviews
Uncanny bodies
Absence as representational strategy
The expressive power of the disembodied voice
74
80
87
97
4 The World in Here
More than the interview seen:
Sheila Sofian’s illustrated interviews
Inside out: animating subjective experience
Hybrids of reality
Animated awareness
106
5 Animated Memories
(Dis)continuities: the self in history
The unspoken and the forgotten: the trauma
in/of history in Silence and Waltz with Bashir
139
146
Afterword
170
Notes
174
Bibliography
180
Index
189
v
112
117
124
135
155
List of Figures
I.1
1.1
2.1
2.2
2.3
3.1
3.2
3.3
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
5.1
5.2
5.3
The Sinking of the Lusitania (dir. Winsor McCay, 1918)
American Homes (dir. Bernard Friedman, 2011)
Planet Dinosaur (dir. Nigel Paterson, 2011)
Chicago 10 (dir. Brett Morgen, 2007)
Grasshopper (dir. Bob Sabison, 2003)
Roadhead (dir. Bob Sabiston, 1998)
It’s Like That (dir. Southern Ladies Animation Group, 2003)
His Mother’s Voice (dir. Dennis Tupicoff, 1997)
Survivors (dir. Sheila Sofian, 1997)
Animated Minds: The Light Bulb Thing
(dir. Andy Glynne, 2003)
A Is for Autism (dir. Tim Webb, 1992)
Ryan (dir. Chris Landreth, 2004)
Irinka and Sandrinka (dir. Sandrine Stoïanov, 2007)
Silence (dir. Sylvie Bringas & Orly Yadin, 1998)
Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, 2008)
vi
7
35
50
57
62
86
91
98
114
120
127
130
153
159
164
Acknowledgements
I could not have conceived of or completed this book without the help
and support of a number of people. I first started working on this topic
as a doctoral student in the Critical Studies programme of the School
of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. I have my
advisor, Michael Renov, to thank for introducing me to animated documentary and subsequently encouraging me to explore the boundaries
of the documentary canon and for his continued support of my work.
I continue to be grateful to Akira Lippit, George Wilson, Sheila Sofian,
David James, Rick Jewell and Vanessa Schwartz for their support and
guidance during my time at USC. Members of my student cohort have
remained wonderful friends and sources of intellectual and moral support and Kristen Fuhs, Christopher Hanson and Jorie Lagerwey have
generously given up their time to read and comment on parts of the
manuscript.
Colleagues within the School of Arts at the University of Surrey
have provided an environment in which my scholarship on animated
documentary could develop. Helen Hughes’ capacity for astute clarity
has been much appreciated, and she, along with Hing Tsang and Lois
Davis, has offered many stimulating conversations on documentary. I
am grateful to Sherril Dodds and Rachel Fensham for their mentorship
that has proved so valuable in the realisation of this book. The students
to whom I teach documentary and animation studies offer a fresh perspective and insight, and continually reinvigorate my passion for the
subject.
The communities of scholars that make up the Society for Animation
Studies and attend the annual Visible Evidence documentary conference have provided vibrant and thought-provoking discussion and
debate that has nurtured my work. In particular Paul Ward, Paul Wells,
Caroline Ruddell, Nichola Dobson, Brian Winston, Patrick Sjöberg
and Joshua Malitsky have been sources of great encouragement over
the years. I am very grateful to the filmmakers and animators who
have so willingly and generously shared their work and their thoughts
with me both when I was working on my PhD and whilst writing this
book, especially Liz Blazer, David Sproxton, Jonathan Hodgson, Marjut
Rimminen, Bob Sabiston, Dennis Tupicoff, Orly Yadin, Samantha
Moore, Ellie Land, Ruth Lingford and Shira Avni. Sections of this work
vii
viii
Acknowledgements
have been published in different versions in the following: Uncanny
Indexes: Rotoshopped Interview as Documentary. Animation: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (1) (March 2012), Sage; Absence, Excess and
Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of
Animated Documentary. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (3)
(November 2011), Sage.
Thank you to my family and friends for continuing to be my greatest supporters and cheerleaders. Most importantly, to my husband, best
friend and all-round favourite person Nick Roe, who never lets me give
up and always believes I can do it, this one’s for you.
Introduction
Animation and documentary make an odd couple. Theirs is a marriage
of opposites, made complicated by different ways of seeing the world.
The former conjures up thoughts of comedy, children’s entertainment
and folkloric fantasies; the latter carries with it the assumptions of seriousness, rhetoric and evidence. The long history of the hybridisation
of animation and documentary, one that stretches back to the earliest
days of the moving image, belies the incongruity of their pairing and
suggests that, as in many things in life, opposites can attract in a meaningful way. Animation has long been used in non-fictional contexts to
illustrate, clarify and emphasise, and animated segments have featured
in non-fiction films ranging from Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series
(1942–5) to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002). It is since
the 1990s, however, that we have seen an increase in the production
of what has become known as the ‘animated documentary’. As well
as appearing in the line-up of animation and documentary festivals
worldwide with increasing frequency and prominence, feature-length
animated documentaries have received mainstream theatrical releases –
for example, Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2007) and Waltz with Bashir (Ari
Folman, 2008) – and digital animation has been a staple of primetime
television documentary series since prehistory was brought back to life
by the BBC in Walking with Dinosaurs (Tim Haines and Jasper James,
1999).
In Animated Documentary, I explore a wide array of examples of animated documentary and question the implications of the use of animation as a representational strategy in documentary. In order to address
this question, I look at the ways animation is used in animated documentary: what and how is the animation representing; how and why
is animation being used instead of the conventional alternative?1 This
1
2
Animated Documentary
further implies an interrogation of the ontological differences between
animation and live action, in terms of their relationship with reality.
For while the indexical relationship between film and reality, something upon which documentary’s claims to truth and evidence so heavily rest, is absent, animation is very much present, both lacking and
exceeding the visual indexical bond between image and reality. This
non-conventional relationship between image and reality in animated
documentary also places greater emphasis on the soundtrack. The pairing of typical documentary sound, such as didactic voice-of-God narration or recordings of interviews, and animated images makes for an
interesting combination that questions the way meaning is conveyed in
animated documentary.
While animation might at first seem to threaten the documentary
project by destabilising its claim to represent reality, I suggest that the
opposite is the case. Animation, in part through its material differences
from live-action film, shifts and broadens the limits of what and how
we can show about reality by offering new or alternative ways of seeing
the world. It can present the conventional subject matter of documentary (the ‘world out there’ of observable events) in non-conventional
ways. It also has the potential to convey visually the ‘world in here’ of
subjective, conscious experience – subject matters traditionally beyond
the documentary purview. By releasing documentary from the strictures of a causal connection between filmic and profilmic, animation
has the potential to bring things that are temporally, spatially and
psychologically distant from the viewer into closer proximity. It can
conflate history, transcend geography and give insight into the mental
states of other people.
Despite the long shared history of animation and documentary,
which is explored in more detail later, their cross-pollination has been
relatively neglected by documentary studies. This neglect is rooted in
several possible causes, one of which is that animated documentaries
are most often made by those who are animators first and documentary
makers second, that is, by filmmakers trained in the craft and art of animation, who have chosen to turn their attention to non-fiction subject
matter. This means that animated documentaries might be argued to fit
more easily into the animation canon (of both films and scholarly literature). However, more often than not it is less a case of argument, and
more a case of awareness, in that animators and animation scholars are
more attuned to new work being done in the field of animation than
documentary scholars would be, something that reflects Paul Ward’s
claim that the ‘relationship between practice and theory is especially
Introduction 3
acute in the field of Animation Studies,’ which he attributes to the
diversity of animation production methods and techniques (Ward,
2006: 229). There is also little question that animated documentaries
are animated films, whereas there is potential debate as to whether animation is an acceptable mode of representation for documentary.
Bill Nichols comments in Blurred Boundaries (1994: 29) that the documentary is ‘dependent on the specificity of its images for authenticity’. The authenticity of a documentary, and the strength of its claim
to be such a type of film, are deeply linked to notions of realism and
the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually
happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and
reality. Animation presents problems for this documentary ontology
and this means that animated documentaries do not fit easily into the
received wisdom of what a documentary is. Anecdotally, this is something I can attest to. A frequent response to mention of animated documentaries – ‘does such a thing exist?’ – is couched in the widely held
assumptions regarding what a documentary should look like and what
sorts of images it should contain. The presumption goes that documentaries should be observational, unobtrusive, truthful, bear witness to
actual events, contain interviews and, even, be objective. 2
In fact, it can easily be argued that documentary does not, and never
has, fully upheld these characteristics. John Grierson’s (1933: 8) definition of documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ has demonstrated longevity over 70 years of flux and change in the boundaries
of documentary. The attraction lies, in part, in the broadness of this
definition. It is easy to mould it to the user’s requirements and it lends
itself to such a large range of approaches and styles that it has proved
resilient to aesthetic, ideological and technological developments in
documentary making. It is, for example, equally as applicable to the
non-interventional films of 1960s Direct Cinema, as to Errol Morris’
interviews and stylised re-enactments and, indeed, to animated documentary. There is a promise in this Griersonian definition, however,
as well as in the colloquial understanding of documentary, that these
sorts of films should be about the events, experiences and people that
exist in the actual world. As Nichols (2001: xi) suggests, documentaries
‘address the world in which we live rather than a world imagined by
the filmmaker’ (emphasis in original). Nichols and Grierson help us
think of animation as a viable means of documentary expression. After
all, if Grierson’s definition allows re-enactment (a staple of the British
Documentary Movement), why not also animation as a way of creatively treating actuality? And thinking of a distinction between the and
4
Animated Documentary
a world helps us differentiate between animation that is non-fictional
and that which is based on make-believe.
Animation is no less complex a term to define than documentary.
Norman McLaren’s definition of animation as ‘not the art of drawings
that move but the art of movements that are drawn’ is as attractive in its
broadness as his one-time mentor Grierson’s definition of documentary
(quoted in Furniss, 1998: 5). For the purposes of this book, however, we
might take our lead from Charles Solomon, who identifies two key factors inherent to animation. That is, that ‘the imagery is recorded frameby-frame’ and ‘the illusion of motion is created, rather than recorded’
(quoted in Furniss, 1998: 5). These ideas, of frame-by-frame manipulation and the construction of an illusion of motion, are ones that apply
to both handmade and digitally produced animation. They also encompass the broad range of techniques and styles that can be considered
animation, including cel animation, puppet animation, Claymation,
three-dimensional computer-generated animation and so on.
Mindful of this, I would suggest that an audiovisual work (produced
digitally, filmed, or scratched directly on celluloid)3 could be considered
an animated documentary if it: (i) has been recorded or created frame
by frame; (ii) is about the world rather than a world wholly imagined by
its creator; and (iii) has been presented as a documentary by its producers and/or received as a documentary by audiences, festivals or critics.
This last criterion is significant as it helps differentiate two aesthetically
similar films that may be motivated by different intentions by their
respective producers, or received in different ways by audiences. It also
helps to narrow the field; advertising, scientific, educational and public service films, arenas in which animation is frequently utilised, fall
beyond what I would consider an animated documentary (and thus, the
scope of this book) because they are neither intended, nor received as
documentaries.
The first criterion does not preclude films that combine animation
and live action or the photographic, as in fact many animated documentaries do. It is impossible to put a quantitative requirement on the
amount of animation that a film should contain in order for it to be
classed an animated documentary. Instead, it is more useful to think
about how documentaries that use animation and live action or other
photographic material integrate their various media. For a film to be
an animated documentary in such a case, the animation must be integrated to the extent that the meaning of the film would become incoherent were it to somehow be removed. An excellent example of this
Introduction 5
is Abuelas (Afarin Eghbal, 2011), an animated documentary about the
‘Grandmothers of May Square’ in Argentina and their quest to discover
what happened to their children and grandchildren who were ‘disappeared’ during Videla’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s and early
1980s. The film was shot on a digital stills camera and created using pixilation, an animation technique that manipulates the profilmic objects
and bodies frame by frame. This creates a subtle jerkiness in imagery
that otherwise appears as live action and this style of animation reflects
the film’s story of generations cleaved by external forces. The animated
and the photographic are interwoven to such an extent that they cannot be parsed out from each other, meaning that one would be hard
pressed to determine what percentage of Abuelas is animated and what
percentage is photographic media and, even if one could, this would not
necessarily enhance our reception or understanding of the film. This
type of integration and cohesion, much like two chemical elements that
have reacted to form a new substance from which neither original element could then be extracted, distinguishes an animated documentary
that combines photographic media with animation from, for example,
the documentaries discussed later that use animation for moments of
interjection and intersection.
Animation and documentary’s shared history
It is not my intention here to re-hash a history of animated documentary, much of which is covered in the existing literature (See:
DelGaudio, 1997; Patrick, 2004; Strøm, 2003; Wells, 1997). Instead, this
section aims to point out some significant tendencies in the early intersections between animation and documentary, as well as to suggest a
turning point towards the development of the animated documentary
as a form in its own right. It would be tempting to trace a neat linear
history that takes us teleologically from these early intersections of
animation and documentary to the more recent examples. However,
the genesis of the animated documentary reveals a less direct, more
convoluted trajectory. In Remediation, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin
(2000: 21, n.1), cite Foucault’s conception of genealogy in making a
connection between new and old media technologies and practices.
They seek out ‘historical affiliations or resonances and not origins’,
adapting genealogy to relationships of power to ‘formal relations with
and among media’. Thomas Elsaesser (2006: 18), on the other hand,
rejects the concept of genealogy altogether in favour of the notion
6
Animated Documentary
of archaeology, in his examination of the relationship between new
media and early cinema. He tells us:
An archaeology is the opposite of genealogy: the latter tries to trace
back a continuous line of descent from the present to the past, the
former knows only the presumption of discontinuity and the synecdoche of the fragment can hope to give a present access to its past.
Elsaesser maps film history as a network, rather than ‘discrete units’ and
in doing this he draws attention to Foucault’s claim that history is not
continuous, but is rather a process of breaks, mutations and transformations (Elsaesser, 2006: 17; Foucault, 2008 [1969]: 6).
Just as Boter and Grusin and Elsaesser point to the folly of examining
new media as discrete from the history of cinema and visual arts, so too
would one fall foul of an attempt to mark out contemporary animated
documentary as separate, yet linearly descended, from the history of
these two forms. Instead, the precedent for contemporary animated
documentaries must be mapped as a network of both interweaving and
independent threads. This is a history of mutual enrichment through
a wide variety of different types of hybridisation of animation and
documentary. Importantly, this intertwined history is not a teleological progression towards the current trend of animated documentaries.
Just as Foucault’s archaeology of the history of ideas ‘does not seek to
rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses,
on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows
them’ (Foucault, 2008 [1969]: 115), the history of the overlaps between
animation and documentary is not one of easy continuities. There is
no single beginning, but rather many concurrent, international examples that demonstrate the instinct that documentary can be strengthened via animation, and vice versa. Similarly, there is no terminal point
towards which this history progresses. What is important to take from
this history, however, is that from early on animation was seen to have
a unique representational function for the non-fiction moving image,
one that could not be fulfilled by the conventional live-action, photographic-based alternative.
In 1918, pioneer American animator Winsor McCay made what is
widely dubbed the ‘first animated documentary,’ The Sinking of the
Lusitania (Patrick, 2004: 36; Wells, 1997: 42, 1998: 16). McCay, who was
better known for his weekly comic strips, Little Nemo and Dreams of
a Rarebit Fiend, and later his flamboyant vaudeville lightening sketch
performances and animated high jinx with Gertie the Dinosaur (1914),
Introduction 7
turned to non-fiction upon the sinking of the British passenger liner
Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915. Shocked at the death of innocent civilians, many of them American, but stymied by the absence
of filmed footage or photographs of the sinking, McCay recreated the
events, as retold by survivors, using animation.4 His aesthetic approach
to the material was modified from his usual animation style to suit the
subject matter, and the look of the 12-minute long film resembles nonfiction media of the time, such as newspaper editorial illustrations and
newsreels.5
Significantly, The Sinking of the Lusitania contains several textual
implications of the suitability of animation to the representation of real
life, a sentiment that is echoed in extra-textual material surrounding
the film. An early intertitle tells the audience: ‘you are looking at the
first record of the sinking of the Lusitania’ (emphasis added) and, in general, the images’ perspective resembles those of an imaginary eyewitness, viewing the events from a distance (see Figure I.1). The Lusitania is
mostly seen in ‘long shots’ that allow us, for example, to watch its slow
but inevitable disappearance after the torpedo strike. Even the live-action prologue, in which we see McCay and his colleagues setting to work
on drawing the film’s images, suggests an unproblematic application of
Figure I.1 The point of view of an imaginary eyewitness in The Sinking of the
Lusitania (dir. Winsor McCay, 1918)
8
Animated Documentary
animation as a medium for an actuality subject. McCay makes no distinction between live action and animation in terms of their ability to
show us reality, and reviewers seemed equally content to accept that the
film offered audiences a chance to ‘witness the whole tragedy, from the
moment of the first attack to the heartrending ending’ (Bioscope, 1919:
74, emphasis added). This critical response echoed the film’s marketing
by its production company as ‘the World’s Only Record of the Crime
that Shocked Humanity!’ (Quoted in Canemaker, 1987: 154, emphasis
added).6 The Sinking of the Lusitania demonstrates the early use of animation as a substitute for missing live-action material.
While McCay’s film was the first commercially released ‘animated
documentary’,7 it is preceded by examples of animation being used in
a non-fiction context. Animation has historically been used as a tool of
illustration and clarification in factual films. British filmmaker Percy
Smith made a series of films, including Fight for the Dardanelles (1915),
which used animation to depict battles of the First World War. In the
United States, Max Fleischer made animated films for the military as
early as 1917 that were used to train soldiers heading to the battle zones
of Europe. The realisation that animation could clarify and explain
more effectively and efficiently than live action led to an even greater
uptake of the medium by the US government in the Second World
War. Perhaps inspired by the shorts already made for the National Film
Board of Canada by the Walt Disney Studios to promote the Canadian
war effort (See: Honess Roe, 2011),8 the US Government commissioned
Disney to make numerous educational and training films during the
war and the studio also provided the animated sections for Frank Capra’s
Why We Fight series of seven propaganda films (1942–5). In these types
of films we see animated maps, moving illustrations of military equipment and diagrams that explain military strategy.
This use of animation demonstrates that envisioned information is
easier to understand and retain, and that much factual information is
communicated more efficiently via animation than the spoken word.
Many of these films also conveyed more than facts through their animation by using it for emphasis and visual association. Simple symbolism
prevails throughout the Why We Fight series, such as pitting dark hues
for enemy nations against paler colours for the Allies. This type of symbolism is established in the series’ first animated sequence, in Prelude
to War (1942), when a dark, black inky stain spreads across Japan, Italy
and Germany as the narrator notes the cultural differences between
those countries and the US. As James Elkins (1999: 224) has pointed
out, ‘the real subjects of maps usually [ … ] serve territorial, religious,
Introduction 9
or nationalist agendas’. The animated maps in the Why We Fight films
serve a purpose beyond merely marking out geographical boundaries,
they are also helping deliver the nationalist, propagandistic message of
the series.
Outside of wartime, there is a long history of putting animation to
educational use. While still working in the Midwest before moving
to California, Walt Disney was commissioned to make two films on
dental hygiene and with these early pedagogic endeavours he was following many of the pioneers of animation and cinema.9 As early as
1910, Thomas Edison made instructional films that included animated
sequences and, according to Richard Fleischer (2005: 27), Randolph
Bray made partially animated educational films for the US Government
prior to 1916. Subsequently, animators from the Soviet Union to the
United States would use animation to explore the physical world. From
the Fleischer Brother’s Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1923) to Vsevolod
Pudovkin’s The Mechanics of the Human Brain (1926), animation was
used as a prescient tool to explain, clarify and visualise.
Even earlier than this, Percy Smith became interested in the use of
animation while working at the Board of Education at the turn of the
Twentieth Century (Low, 1949: 157). While Smith mostly focused on
cinematography and the use of such devices as time-lapse photography
and microcinematography, he also made animated scientific films. How
Spiders Fly (1909) used stop-motion animation to bring a model spider
to life and was intended to help cure arachnophobia. For Smith, animation was a way of revealing aspects of the natural world that were previously unseen by the human eye and animation was another technique
to access the ‘new way of seeing’ offered by the technologies developed
from the Eighteenth Century onwards that expanded the realm of
human vision (See: Beattie, 2008: 129–50). There are plenty of contemporary examples of animation being used in documentary for a specific
purpose and animated segments are still used in a non-fictional context
to clarify, explain, illustrate and emphasise. The uses of animated maps,
charts, graphs and diagrams in mainstream formats ranging from television news to theatrical documentary are too numerous to mention.
This illustrative function of animation has become commonplace to
the point of being inconspicuous. Similarly, natural history, science and
history programming now use digital animation as a matter of course to
bring to life objects and events that are impossible to capture with the
live-action camera.10 For example, the BBC’s recent Wonders of the Solar
System (2010) displays CGI close-up images of far-off planets that would
be impossible to film or photograph.
10 Animated Documentary
A frequent, and perhaps relatively recent, use of animation in liveaction documentaries is to create moments of, often ironic, interjection
or intersection. Here a segment of animation is inserted in a primarily
live-action film to in some way enhance its meaning. In films such as
Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002), Blue Vinyl (Judith Hefland
and Daniel B. Gold, 2002), She’s a Boy I Knew (Gwen Haworth, 2007)
and The Age of Stupid (Franny Armstrong, 2009), animation is rendered
in a humorous and cartoon-like style as a way of contrasting with the
seriousness of the documentaries’ subject matter. Emily Hubley’s simple line-drawing style of animation in Blue Vinyl punctuates Hefland’s
argument regarding our self-destructive reliance on PVC. The animated
segments in Bowling for Columbine evoke the anarchic humour of the
South Park (Trey Parker and Matt Stone, 1997-ongoing) television show
and highlight the absurdity, as perceived by Moore, of America’s relationship with firearms. Animation is put to a similar use in The Age of
Stupid, where Jonathan Hodgson’s three animated sequences reiterate
and consolidate some of the film’s key points regarding the environment, climate change and sustainability. The ‘war on resources’ segment
concisely and ingeniously makes links between colonialism, capitalism
and the depletion of natural resources by condensing the global history of human and natural exploitation, from prehistory to the Iraq
War, into less than two minutes. In She’s a Boy I Knew, Gwen Haworth
interjects animated sections into her autobiographical account of her
gender transition. Retro adverts and magazine extracts are brought into
motion in a segment entitled ‘how to be a girl … by Mom’ that accents,
in a light-hearted way, the issues Gwen’s mother has with her take on
being female. Haworth has commented that she included animation
to ‘lighten the mood’ and add humour to her film, as she was concerned it might otherwise become too intense and serious. Animated
interjections switch the mood and the contrast between live action and
animation as modes of address creates moments of thematic and tonal
punctuation in a documentary.
With the exception of The Sinking of the Lusitania, none of the historical examples, or the more recent documentaries that use animated
interjections, would be described as animated documentaries, either by
their makers or their audiences. They lack the sense of animation and
documentary cohering into a single form in which the animation works
to enhance our knowledge of an aspect of the world and to the extent
that the separation of the animation from the documentary is either
impossible, or would render the inherent meaning of the film incomprehensible. The Age of Stupid would still work as a coherent film without
Introduction 11
Hodgson’s animated sequences, despite being the poorer without them,
just as the propagandist message of the Why We Fight films would still
be present, if perhaps not quite as loud, without Disney’s animated
maps and charts. Films that do warrant classification as animated documentaries, such as Waltz with Bashir, Walking with Dinosaurs and the
Animated Minds series (Andy Glynne, 2003, 2009), are documentaries
that have animation embedded into their very core. The first-person
accounts of mental health issues in Animated Minds
