Animated Documentary

Annabelle Honess Roe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349437092, 9781137017451
• eBook ISBN: 9781137017468
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Animated Documentary, the first book to be published on this fascinating topic, considers how animation is used as a representational strategy in nonfiction film and television and explores the ways animation expands the range and depth of what documentary can show us about the world. On behalf of the Society for Animation Studies(SAS), the Chair of the Jury announced the book as the winner of the delayed 2015 SAS McLaren-Lambart Award with the following words: 'Animated Documentary is a vital addition to both animation scholarship and film studies scholarship more broadly, expertly achieving the tricky challenge of synthesising these two scholarly traditions to provide a compelling and brilliantly coherent account of the animated documentary form. At the heart of Roe's book is the conviction that animated documentary "has the capacity to represent temporally, geographically, and psychologically distal aspects of life beyond the reach of live action" (p. 22). As a representational strategy, Roe details how animated documentary can be seen to adopt techniques of "mimetic substitution, non-mimetic substitution and evocation" in response to the limitations of live action material (p. 26). Animated Documentary will without doubt become an essential resource for many years to come for anyone interested in the intersection of animation and documentary.'

1

Representational Strategies

Despite the proliferation of animated documentary production since the 1990s, and their increased exposure through festivals, conferences and public viewing outlets, there was until recently only a handful of published scholarly material on the form. A recent special edition of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (November 2011) on animated documentary and an increase in articles and chapters in other publications hopefully signals the beginnings of a critical mass in this area, something this book means to contribute towards. The purpose of this first chapter is to theoretically situate this book in the scholarly context that already exists for animated documentary. Exploring how animated documentaries have been understood and interpreted in the existing literature enables me to position my own suggestion that a useful way to think about how animated documentaries work is via a consideration of the functionality of animation, or what the animation is doing better than the viable live-action alternative (if there is one). The second half of this chapter addresses animation as a representational strategy for documentary by unpicking how the ontology of film has been theorised. Many of documentary’s claims to represent reality are rooted in the ontology of film, a foundation that questions what the ontological differences between live action and animation imply for the use of animation in a non-fiction context.

The scholarly landscape for animated documentaries began to take shape in the late 1990s. In 1997, two essays appeared on the subject of animated documentary: Sybil DelGaudio’s ‘If truth be told, can ‘toons tell it? Documentary and animation’ in the journal Film/History and Paul Wells’s ‘The Beautiful Village and the True Village: A Consideration of Animation and the Documentary Aesthetic’ in a special edition of Art & Design Magazine guest edited by Wells. These first forays into examining the existence and nature of animated documentaries were followed several years later by two further essays: Gunnar Strøm’s ‘The Animated Documentary’ in 2003, and Eric Patrick’s ‘Representing Reality: Structural/Conceptual Design in Non-Fiction Animation’ (Animac Magazine, 2004). Then, in 2005, the March issue of the online animation magazine FPS (Frames per Second Magazine) made animated documentaries its cover story and included three articles on the topic by both animators and scholars. The same year saw the release of Paul Ward’s short book Documentary: The Margins of Reality, which includes a chapter on animated documentary.

Much of this early scholarship on animated documentary takes as its foundation key ideas from documentary studies, in particular, the desire to fit animated documentary into the organisational structure of documentary ‘modes’ first suggested by Bill Nichols (1991) in Representing Reality.¹ Ward argues for certain types of animated documentaries, namely ones that include documentary voiceover and interviews with participants, as fitting into the ‘interactive’ mode. He casts these animated documentaries as interactive not just because of the nature and origin of their audio tracks, but also because their production involves the collaboration of the documentary subject(s). DelGaudio (1997: 192), on the other hand, prefers to class animated documentaries within the ‘reflexive’ mode because, she claims, ‘animation itself acts as a form of “metacommentary” within a documentary’. She is suggesting here that by adopting animation as a medium of representation, animated documentaries are necessarily passing comment on live action’s ability, or lack thereof, to represent reality. This is especially the case, she argues, in animated documentaries that document events and topics that were not, or could not have been, captured on camera.

Both Strøm and Patrick see animated documentaries as examples of Nichols’ ‘performative’ mode. According to Nichols (2001: 131), the ‘performative documentary underscores the complexity of our knowledge of the world by emphasizing its subjective and affective dimensions’. His conceptualisation appears to welcome animation as a mode of representation, not least because of the necessarily subjective nature of much of animation production. Patrick (2004: 38) identifies this appeal with his claim that ‘the very nature of animation is to foreground its process and artifice’. Furthermore, when Nichols (2001: 131) tells us that ‘the world as represented by performative documentaries becomes, however, suffused by evocative tones and expressive shadings that constantly remind us that the world is more than the sum of the visible evidence we derive from it’, it is as if he could be speaking directly to animation.

I would suggest, however, that to shoehorn the animated documentary into one of Nichols’ modes threatens to limit our understanding of the form. Ward’s ascription of animated documentaries to the interactive mode is, as he admits, only applicable to certain types of animated documentary; not all animated documentaries have a documentary voiceover and even fewer are produced through an interactive relationship between producer and subject. Similarly, DelGaudio’s definition of animated documentaries as reflexive excludes those films that are not necessarily critiquing live action’s capabilities to represent reality. Even if animation is doing something live action cannot, it does not necessarily follow that the resulting film is self-consciously passing comment on the representational abilities of either approach. The assignment of animated documentaries to the performative mode is, I contend, equally limiting. Nichols’ explanation of the performative mode is, at times, nebulous. Although these types of documentary foreground subjectivity, they also ‘demonstrate how embodied knowledge provides entry into an understanding of the more general processes at work in society’ (2001: 131). This is a definition of the performative documentary that is far harder to reconcile with animation.

We might question, then, whether it is in fact useful to try to fit animated documentaries into Nichols’ modes of documentary production. Both Wells and Patrick come up, instead, with different typologies that may be more fruitful for a discussion of this form. Wells re-figures the modes of documentary production outlined by Richard Barsam and examines how animated documentaries fit into, and expand, these modes. In so doing he reconstitutes Barsam’s categories into four ‘dominant areas within the field of animation’ (Wells, 1997: 41). By tracing similarities in overall tone, subject matter, structure and style, Wells determines these four dominant areas as the imitative mode, the subjective mode, the fantastic mode, and the postmodern mode.

Films in the imitative mode ‘directly echo the dominant generic conventions of live-action documentary’ (Wells, 1997: 41). As such, Wells claims, these films are often intended to educate, inform and persuade. The subjective mode often challenges the notion of objectivity through creating tension between the visual and the aural by combining humorous animated representations with ‘serious’ documentary voiceovers or by connecting to broader social issues through the individual expression of the animator (Wells, 1997: 43). Ultimately, the subjective mode uses animation to ‘re-constitute “reality” on local and relative terms’ (Wells, 1997: 44). The fantastic mode extends the subjective mode’s commentary on realism and objectivity to the extent of rejecting realism entirely as ‘an ideologically charged (often politically corrupt) coercion of commonality’ (Wells, 1997: 44). The fantastic mode further challenges accepted modes of documentary representation by presenting reality through the lens of surrealist animation that bears little or no resemblance to either the physical world or previous media styles. The postmodern mode adopts the general characteristics of postmodernism in ‘prioritising pastiche, rejecting notions of objective authority, and asserting that “the social”, and therefore “the real”, is now fragmentary and incoherent’ (Wells, 1997: 44). Wells claims that one of the fundamental pursuits of the documentary project is the attempt ‘to engage in the annunciation of commonality and the social dimension of the real’ (Wells, 1997: 45). This pursuit is undermined, Wells contends, by the postmodern mode’s questioning of the possibility of knowledge in itself.

Patrick adopts the notion of ‘structures’ to categorise animated documentaries, suggesting ‘in making any kind of film, structure tends to be the skeleton that the content lives on’ (2004: 39). He proposes three primary structures – the illustrative, narrated, and sound-based – and a fourth, the ‘extended structure,’ which is an extension of Wells’ fantastic mode (Patrick, 2004: 39). ‘The four structures encompass the range of possible approaches to animated documentaries without initial regard to concept, techniques or aesthetics’ (Patrick, 2004: 39). Patrick takes a conceptual approach different from Wells, looking through the lens of storytelling rather than the films’ relationship to reality. ‘Illustrative’, Patrick contends, is a more apt term to describe the films discussed by Wells under the imitative mode. These films illustrate ‘events based on historical or personal evidence’ and use this to structure the storytelling (Patrick, 2004: 40). The narrated structure uses a script to tell the story and these animated documentaries often use ‘voiceover that recounts and connects the elements of the story’ (Patrick, 2004: 40). The sound-based structure, by contrast, ‘uses sound that has either been found or recorded in an unmanipulated, uncontrived way as the primary structuring device’ (Patrick, 2004: 41). Patrick notes that this aural link between film and reality gives these films all at once a ‘naturalistic or improvised’ and ‘dramatic and cinema verite’ feel (Patrick, 2004: 41). Patrick dubs Wells’ fantastic mode as ‘expanded structure’ because it ‘expands the possibilities of the documentary form by transmuting the traditional storytelling method’ (Patrick, 2004: 42). Like Wells, Patrick notes the highly subjective nature of this approach and how films in this category eschew a direct relationship or commentary on reality preferring instead a more surreal, symbolic or metaphoric approach. Patrick then goes on to observe conceptual trends within each mode, by which he means ‘the very essence of the film ... the content of what the filmmaker is talking about’ (Patrick, 2004: 43). So, for example, the sound-based and narrated structures tend to be memorials or portraits of individuals or groups, and films with an illustrative structure often have a historical basis.

This discussion of two different approaches to categorising animated documentaries begs the question of the purpose of such an exercise. Patrick suggests that his structures are ‘a springboard for studying the nature of the form’ (2004: 45). While Patrick’s and Wells’ work helped, in the early days of scholarship on animated documentaries, to make the case for its identification as a discrete form, it is questionable whether their modes and structures help us understand this type of film or fulfil much of a purpose beyond a self-serving one of being able to divide films up among their suggested categories. This question of usefulness and purpose is exacerbated if one queries the founding assumptions of their approaches. For example, it is unclear whether ‘illustrative’, ‘narrated’ and ‘sound-based’ are actually structures of storytelling rather than modes of delivery. Patrick’s omission of a detailed explication of what he understands by the terms ‘structure’ and ‘storytelling’ further muddies these waters.

Wells’ approach, which devises categories that speak to the relationship between representation and reality, can be seen as responding to the so-called crisis of postmodernism in documentary. The year before Wells published his essay, an article by Noël Carroll appeared in the collection co-edited with David Bordwell, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies entitled ‘Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism’ (1996). In this chapter Carroll takes issue with several theorists’ (including Michael Renov, Bill Nichols and Brian Winston) discussion of the fictional elements or stylistic tendencies in some non-fiction. Carroll extrapolates (and, one could argue, misinterprets) these discussions to be wholesale rejection of a connection between documentary and reality. He characterises this as a new trend in scepticism regarding the documentary project, one that is inflected by postmodernism more generally. Even earlier than this, in 1993, Linda Williams’ essay ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History and The Thin Blue Line’ uses the lens of postmodernism to examine that film and suggests truth is relative and contingent. While Wells does not cite either of these essays directly, the way he formulates his modes suggests that the use of animation in documentary inherently critiques conventional documentary’s attempts to objectively represent reality. Furthermore, he implies a teleology developing towards the postmodern mode that ultimately questions the coherence of reality itself.

The existence of a postmodern crisis in documentary has, however, since been debunked. Michael Renov (2004: 137) points out that the targets of Carroll’s censure ‘rarely addressed postmodernism in any direct way in their writings on documentary film’. Renov counters that Carroll’s critique is a ‘documentary disavowal’ that fails to recognise that the form has long since abandoned such rationalist goals as objective, disinterested knowledge (2004:137). Instead, he suggests documentary is more often concerned with ‘contingency, hybridity, knowledge as situated and particular, identity as ascribed and performed’ (2004:137). Renov’s words remind us that contemporary documentary studies rarely questions the notion that the form conveys knowledge. Rather, the pertinent questions are how this knowledge is conveyed and what type of knowledge it is. Wells’ modes of animated documentary made sense in the theoretical landscape of the 1990s, when postmodernist doubts regarding the viability of the documentary project and the very possibility of representing reality were still circulating. Now, while we accept that objective representation is a fantasy, we also acknowledge that this does not entail a wholesale rejection of attempts to represent and convey reality. It is no longer pertinent to question whether or not conventional documentary and animated documentary can represent reality. Instead, I believe it is more interesting to ask what aspects of reality are being conveyed, and how that is being done.

How animation is used in animated documentary

One of the key claims of this book is that animation, freed from the ‘indexical bind’ (Nichols, 1991: 149) of conventional documentary, has the capacity to represent temporally, geographically and psychologically distal aspects of life beyond the reach of live action. It remains true, however, that there are different types of animated documentaries that present their varied subject matter through a multiplicity of styles and techniques. Furthermore, animation is not used in the same way in all animated documentaries. One way to demarcate different types of animated documentaries is to consider how the animation functions. In other words, what is the animation doing that the conventional alternative could not? I suggest that animation functions in three key ways: mimetic substitution, non-mimetic substitution and evocation. I believe this is not just categorisation for the sake of it, but rather a way to help understand how animated documentaries work. In particular, sorting these films into categories of functionality can help us understand in what circumstances animation might be a more suitable representational strategy for documentary than live action, a representational strategy that broadens and deepens the range of what we can make documentaries about.

One way that animation functions in animated documentaries is in a mimetic, or substitutive way. In these instances, the animation illustrates something that would be very hard, or impossible, to show with the conventional live-action alternative and often it is directly standing in for live-action footage. The animation here is substituting for something else. This is, in fact, one of the first ways animation was used in non-fiction scenarios in Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania. More recent examples of substitutive animation can be seen in the BBC’s 1999 natural history series Walking with Dinosaurs, and its later re-boot Planet Dinosaur (2011), and Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 (2007). In Chicago 10, motion capture and traditional animation are used to recreate the trial of Abbie Hoffman and the other members of the anti-war movement accused of inciting riot in the run up to 1968’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. No filmed record of the courtroom exists and these sequences are based on the transcripts of the legal proceedings, which often descended into a circus-like state of chaos as the defendants refused to adhere to the proceeding’s rules and regulations. In Walking with Dinosaurs, prehistoric creatures are created using 3-D computer animation that are superimposed on backdrops that had previously been filmed at suitable looking locations. Twelve years later the BBC once again reconstructed prehistoric life, this time entirely using digital animation techniques.

In these examples, the animation is used to stand-in for live action. This is necessitated for similar reasons in both cases, as well as in older examples such as The Sinking of the Lusitania: that there exists no live-action footage of the events being portrayed. In these examples, animation functions as a kind of re-enactment of historical events and this kind of animated documentary works very much like a documentary that uses reconstruction or re-enactment. In that sense, it calls on the viewer to make certain assumptions and allowances and, similar to a reconstruction, says ‘this is a reasonable likeness of what these events looked like the first time they happened and we have chosen to reconstruct them, or in this case animate them, because we don’t have a filmed record of that first time they happened.’ Substitutive animation often strives to closely resemble reality, or rather, the look of a live-action recording of reality. In most of the examples in this category the animation is created using digital computer techniques, which are achieving ever-increasing levels of verisimilitude and photorealism.

Other animated documentaries also substitute animation for live action; however, whereas the animation in Chicago 10 and Walking with Dinosaurs attempts to mimic the look of reality, these other films are not so constrained. Animated interview documentaries often use this approach, where a documentary soundtrack is loosely interpreted through animated visuals. The 2002 Swedish film Hidden (Gömd, Heilborn, Aronowitsch and Johansson) animates a radio interview with a young illegal immigrant. Unlike Chicago 10, this film has less concern for making the characters resemble their real-life counterparts. Similarly, It’s Like That (Southern Ladies Animation Group, 2004) animates young asylum seekers as knitted puppets of small birds. In these animated documentaries, the animation works as non-mimetic substitution. There is no sense of these examples trying to make a visual link with reality or to create an illusion of a filmed image. Instead, they work towards embracing and acknowledging animation as a medium in its own right, a medium that has the potential to expre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Representational Strategies
• 2  Digital Realities
• 3  Animated Interviews
• 4  The World in Here
• 5  Animated Memories
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index