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Animating documentary

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Animating documentary

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ANIMATING DOCUMENTARY

by

Annabelle Honess Roe

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS—CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2009

Copyright 2009 Annabelle Honess Roe
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The process of completing a PhD dissertation often feels like a lonely task, however, I
could not have conceived or written this project without the input and support of many
people. Firstly, I must thank my advisor Michael Renov who has been a stalwart
champion of my research since my first year in the graduate program at USC and has
supported this project through all its stages. Michael’s passion for documentary, in all its
forms, encouraged me to explore around the edges of the documentary canon and was a
large influence on the topic of this dissertation. Akira Lippit’s questions and suggestions
offered me new ways to think about the project and discussions with him helped nuance
my understanding of the theoretical questions it raises. George Wilson has patiently
helped guide the way through philosophical mazes and offered a much-appreciated
outside perspective.
Several others at USC have helped shape my approach to my work. Sheila Sofian
has enlightened me on the animator’s perspective and shared her work with me. David
James has been a great source of support, encouragement and inspiration. I owe a debt of
gratitude to Rick Jewell, whose sage words of advice over lunch on London’s Southbank
finally nudged me into the writing stage. Vanessa Schwartz encouraged me to think
more rigorously about my topic in the early stages of its conception. Linda Overholt has
tirelessly and graciously kept me present and correct. I have also benefited greatly from
working with my cohort of critical studies students. In particular, Daniel Herbert, James
Cahill, and Jorie Lagerwey offered intellectual and moral support. I am especially
iii
grateful to Kristen Fuhs, wonderful friend and ally, for reading and giving me feedback in
the later stages of writing. Chris Hanson has been the best comrade through six years of
graduate school.
Outside of USC many people have provided valuable insight. In particular Jaimie
Baron, Alisa Lebow, Steve Rifkin, Patrick Sjöberg, Vivian Sobchack, Paul Ward, and
Elizabeth Wood. The communities of scholars that make up the Society for Animation
Studies and attend the annual Visible Evidence documentary conference have provided
vibrant and stimulating discussion and debate that has nurtured my work. I am very
grateful to the filmmakers and animators who have so willingly and generously shared
their work and their thoughts with me, especially Liz Blazer, David Sproxton, Jonathan
Hodgson, Marjut Rimminen, Bob Sabiston, Dennis Tupicoff, and Orly Yadin.
My family and friends have been my greatest supporters and cheerleaders,
encouraging me through crises of self-doubt and celebrating my achievements. Most
importantly, my husband Nick has supported and loved me through this entire process.
As challenging a task, perhaps, as completing this project.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii

List of Figures vi

Abstract viii

Introduction 1
Defining Terms, Setting Boundaries 5
Modes, Structures, and Functions 11
Argument, Methodology and Chapter Summaries 22
Introduction Endnotes 30

Chapter I: Blurring the Boundaries: The Historical Precedent for the 33
Convergence of Animation and Documentary
Introduction 33
The First Animated Documentary? Winsor McCay and The Sinking of 36
the Lusitania
Drawing the Battle Lines: Wartime Animation 42
Animated Education 53
Animating the Abstract: Sponsored Explorations in Form and Technique 58
Eastern Europe and Symbolic Animation 73
United Productions of America 81
Conclusion 86
Chapter I Endnotes 91

Chapter II: Claims of the Real: Animated Re-Enactment and Mimetic 98
Substitution
Introduction 98
Walking with Dinosaurs and the Impression of Indexicality 111
Extrapolating the Future in Life After People 123
Animated Re-Enactment in Chicago 10 130
Conclusion 139
Chapter II Endnotes 144

Chapter III: Absent Bodies/ Present Voices: The Animated Interview 149
Introduction 149
Animated Bodies: Rotoshop and Puppet Non-Fiction Animation 155
Missing Bodies and the Politics of Absence 172
Sound of Mind and Body 187
Conclusion 198
Chapter III Endnotes 202

v

Chapter IV: In Their Shoes: Interpretive Animation and the Expression 208
of Subjectivity
Introduction 208
Sheila Sofian’s Illustrated Interviews 223
Inside Out: Animating Internal Worlds 231
Image and Text: Animated Stream of Consciousness 252
Conclusion 259
Chapter IV Endnotes 262

Chapter V: Remembering and Forgetting: Animated Mediations of the Past 267
Introduction 267
(Dis)continuities: The Self in History 277
The Unspoken and the Forgotten: The Trauma in/of History in Silence 290
and Waltz With Bashir
Conclusion 308
Chapter V Endnotes 311

Conclusion: Imag(in)ing the Impossible 316
Conclusion Endnotes 326

Bibliography 327

Appendix: Films Referenced 340
vi
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: Divide and Conquer (Frank Capra, 1943) 99

Figure 2.2: Battle 360, episode 1 (The History Channel, 2008) 99

Figure 2.3: Battle 360 (The History Channel, 2008) 101

Figure 2.4: Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2007) 133

Figure 3.1: Project Incognito (Bob Sabiston, 1997) 157

Figure 3.2: Snack and Drink (Bob Sabiston, 1999) 161

Figure 3.3: Grasshopper (Bob Sabiston, 2004) 163

Figure 3.4: Hidden (Gömd, David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn, 2002) 175

Figure 3.5: Hidden (Gömd, David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn, 2002) 177

Figure 3.6: It’s Like That (SLAG, 2003) 178

Figure 3.7: Backseat Bingo (Liz Blazer, 2003) 183

Figure 3.8: His Mother’s Voice (Dennis Tupicoff, 1997) 189

Figure 3.9: His Mother’s Voice (Dennis Tupicoff, 1997) 189

Figure 4.1: Survivors (Sheila Sofian, 1997) 226

Figure 4.2: Animated Minds: Fish on a Hook (Andy Glynne, 2003) 234

Figure 4.3: Animated Minds: Obsessively Compulsive (Andy Glynne, 2003) 238

Figure 4.4: Animated Minds: The Light Bulb Thing (Andy Glynne, 2003) 239

Figure 4.5: A is for Autism (Tim Webb, 1992) 243

Figure 4.6: Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004) 247

Figure 4.7: Feeling My Way (Jonathan Hodgson, 1997) 255

Figure 5.1: Learned By Heart (Majut Rimminen and Päivi Takala, 2007) 283

vii
Figure 5.2: Irinka and Sandrinka (Sandrine Stoïanov, 2007) 288

Figure 5.3: Silence (Sylvie Bringas and Orly Yadin, 1998) 295

Figure 5.4: Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), flashback sequence 302

Figure 5.5: Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), present-day sequence 303

Figure 6.1: Photograph of Jesus (Laurie Hill, 2008) 317

viii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a study of animated documentaries through the lens of epistemology.
I argue that animation expands the documentary’s epistemological realm. Not only by
presenting the conventional subject matter of documentaries (the “world out there” of
observable, the witnessable and the external) in new ways, but also through animation’s
potential to visually convey the “world in here” of the personal, the subjective and the
internal. In this way, the animated documentary literally animates and enlivens the
documentary and, with it, documentary studies – casting new light on some of the central
questions of this discipline. As such, my dissertation broadens the scope of both
documentary studies and animation studies and the expectations we might have from both
of these forms.
I begin with the suggestion that there are two key ways in which animation
functions in a non-fiction context: either to substitute for missing live-action material or
to interpret the world and reality in an expressive way. I suggest that this differs from the
way animation and documentary have traditionally been hybridised and in my first
chapter I demonstrate this through an examination of the historical precedent for the
convergence of animation and documentary. In chapters two through four the main
argument of the dissertation is illustrated through textual analysis of animated
documentaries made in the last twenty years. Chapter two deals films and television
programmes in which computer-generated animation attempts to mimic the look of
reality and photoreality. Chapters three and four approach the more interpretive use of
ix
animation in films that attempt to reveal the world from someone else’s psychological
point of view. These examples demonstrate the application of animation’s unique
expressive potential to the revelation of the subjective. In the final chapter I look at
animated documentaries and memory and at how animation has been used in
autobiographical documentaries as a way of accessing the forgotten and traumatic past.
1
INTRODUCTION

It is over a decade since the first critical work was published on the animated
documentary and animated documentaries have been around for much longer prior.
The past twenty to thirty years, however, have seen an increase in the production of this
type of non-fiction. As well as frequently appearing in the line-up of animation and
documentary festivals worldwide, feature-length animated documentaries have recently
received mainstream theatrical releases (Chicago 10 in 2007 and Waltz With Bashir in
2008) and animated television documentary series have been broadcast in primetime slots
(for example, Walking With Dinosaurs on BBC in the UK in 1997 and Battle 360 on The
History Channel in the US, ongoing from 2008). The past ten years has also seen an
increase in academic interest in animated documentaries. Gunnar Strøm has noted that in
2001 the Visible Evidence conference of documentary studies in Brisbane, Australia and
the Sheffield International Documentary Festival in the UK both had panels devoted to
animated documentaries. Since then, panels and papers on animated documentaries have
regularly appeared on the schedules of documentary, animation and more general film
studies conferences and festivals. In 2007, the International Documentary Festival
Amsterdam dedicated an entire strand of the festival to the form and the following year
the annual International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film had a
program entitled “Animadoc” that focused on the convergence of animation and
documentary through screenings and panels.
Despite the rising prevalence of the animated documentary and its increased
exposure through festivals, conferences and public viewing outlets, there is still a relative
2
paucity in scholarly work on the form. In 1997, two essays appeared on the subject:
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 in 2003 (one by Michael Renov and the other by Gunnar Strøm)
1
and Eric
Patrick’s “Representing Reality: Structural/Conceptual Design in Non-Fiction
Animation” in 2004 in Animac Magazine. 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 published Paul Ward’s short book Documentary: The Margins of
Reality, which includes a chapter on animated documentary.
In his 2003 article, Strøm noted that “the animated documentary largely has been
overlooked in documentary literature of the last twenty years.”
2
Subsequently, upon
observing the absence of animation in accounts of the development and history of
documentary, Patrick stated even more firmly that “the animated documentary holds an
irrelevant status in the annuls of documentary history.”
3
Half a decade later and there is
largely still an absence of animation in documentary studies. Apart from Michael
Renov’s essay and the chapter of Paul Ward’s book there is little or no other published
scholarship on the animated documentary within the literature of documentary studies.
Animation studies has made a greater acknowledgement of the form and the other essays
3
and articles listed above originate in animation-specific journals and magazines.
Furthermore, non-fiction animation is more likely to be mentioned in general animation
books than in the equivalent documentary texts. Paul Wells’ Understanding Animation,
for example, refers to animated documentaries in the context of his discussion on realism
in animation. Similar books in documentary studies, ones designed to give an overview
of the field and an introduction to key terms, theories and discussions, tend to neglect to
mention animation entirely.
The reasons for this relative neglect by documentary studies in comparison to
animation studies could have several causes. Animated documentaries are most often
made by filmmakers who are animators first and documentary-makers second. That is,
by people who are trained or experienced in the craft and art of animation and who have
chosen to turn their attention to non-fiction subject matter. These are often filmmakers
who have already earned themselves a place in the annals of animation. As such,
animated documentaries might be argued to fit more easily into the animation canon (of
both films and literature). Furthermore, there is little question that animated
documentaries are animated films. There is, however, potential debate as to whether
animation is an acceptable mode of representation in a documentary.
Bill Nichols comments in Blurred Boundaries that the documentary is “dependent
on the specificity of its images for authenticity.”
4
In chapter two, I discuss how the
authenticity of a documentary and the power of its claim to be such a type of film are
deeply linked to ideas about the indexicality of the photographic-based image.
Animation presents problems for this documentary ontology and, as such, animated
4
documentaries often do not fit easily into the received wisdom of what a documentary is.
Anecdotally, I can attest to this. The most frequent response I have received upon telling
people the subject of this dissertation is “animated documentaries? Do they exist?” The
general bemusement that greets me is founded in certain assumptions regarding what a
documentary should look like and what sorts of images it should contain.
As counter-intuitive, however, as the marriage between documentary and
animation may still feel to some, scholarship on the form must go beyond merely
remarking at their union, marveling at how opposites attract, or attempting to justify its
existence. This was the role of the early literature on animated documentaries. Strøm,
DelGaudio and Patrick all engage in the task of reconciling these two apparently
antithetical media forms. They remind us of the inherent artificiality in conventional
documentary approaches and that processes of selection, production and editing undercut
any suggestion of objectivity. They go on to contest indexicality as a marker of
documentary authenticity. They also point out that documentary is hard to define and
several of the accepted definitions, such as Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality”
are broad enough to include animation as a mode of representation.
These were important arguments to take up in the nascent literature on the form.
Now, however, as the form develops and matures with the production of increasingly
sophisticated and complex works, so too must our study of it. With this dissertation, I
intend to advance the discussion on animated documentaries. Rather than justifying the
existence of the form or its place in the literature, I am concerned here with the questions
the animated documentary raises for documentary studies. In particular, I am interested
5
in the ways animated documentaries challenge our understanding of documentary
epistemology. That is, what we can learn from a documentary and how we learn it

Defining Terms, Setting Boundaries
Before I proceed, however, it is important to define the parameters of this study.
Accordingly, this section will clarify the conceptual, geographical and historical limits of
this dissertation. Before defining the key object of enquiry – the animated documentary –
it is apposite to first consider these two terms separately. The documentary, as noted
above, is a form whose boundaries flux and change. As such, the term has proved a
difficult one to define. John Grierson’s definition of documentary as “the creative
treatment of actuality” clearly still holds an attraction as demonstrated by its frequent
citation some seventy years since Grierson first suggested it.
5
The attraction lies, in part,
in the broadness of this definition. As mentioned above, it is easy to meld this definition
to the user’s requirements and it is applicable to a vast range of topics and filmmaking
styles. It also acknowledges two key aspects that both distinguish and connect
documentary to fiction – that of its necessary link to reality, or actuality, and the process
of creation that is entailed in its production. Documentary production is a creative act,
just like fiction, but documentary is about the actual, a restriction not inflicted upon
fictional works.
The broadness of Grierson’s definition has, however, aroused contention. Its all-
encompassing openness means that it can become meaningless to define a film under its
rubric. We could argue that any film can be thought of as the “creative treatment of
6
actuality,” depending on how we understand those individual terms. Furthermore, Brian
Winston has argued that “the supposition that any ‘actuality’ is left after ‘creative
treatment’ can now be seen as being at best naïve and at worst a mark of duplicity.”
6

Here, Winston is pointing to the inherent vagueness and potential contradiction in
Grierson’s definition. Winston also claims that the definition of documentary is
something that perplexed the filmmakers working under his aegis in the 1930s as much as
it seems to continue to confound scholars and historians of documentary today.
7

Other approaches to defining documentary have been suggested. One notion that
has gained purchase is that documentary should be defined by the process of reception
rather than inception. That is, a film is a documentary if it is understood to be such by
those who watch it. Carl Plantinga claims that the “distinction between fiction and
nonfiction is not based solely on intrinsic textual properties, but also on the extrinsic
context of production, distribution, and reception.”
8
He contends the importance of
“indexing,”
9
or how a film is identified as fiction or nonfiction in the public realm by
professional producers (including the distributors and exhibitors) and consumers (as in
critics) of film. Similarly, Dai Vaughan has posed that the difficulty in defining
documentary arises because “the term … properly describes not a style or a method or a
genre of filmmaking but a mode of response to film material.”
10
These reception-based
definitions of documentary have been taken up by both Paul Ward and Stella Bruzzi. For
Ward, these definitions help overcome the potential theoretical difficulties of
documentaries that include dramatized re-enactments or animation.
11
For Bruzzi, they
acknowledge that documentary makers and viewers can be aware of the complexities of
7
nonfiction representation while, at the same time, accept a film as occupying this
category.
12

Ward, furthermore, suggests that the decision as to whether one is watching a
documentary or a fiction film is not one that can be made in isolation by an individual
viewer. Rather, “this is something that is socially negotiated.”
13
Here he is implying that
to be a documentary viewer is to be an active viewer, one that must constantly negotiate
the ontology of what one is watching with respect to cultural knowledge of both the
textual and extra-textual world. I would propose, however, that it still remains useful to
consider what types of films the viewer is likely to understand as a documentary, and in
particular, how we distinguish a documentary from a fiction film. What are the textual
and extra-textual factors that result in a film being “indexed” as a documentary and
understood as such by the audience?
Bill Nichols's distinction between documentary and fiction is, while rather
simplistic, also useful. The former, he tells us, “address the world in which we live rather
than a world imagined by the filmmaker.”
14
This contrast is more helpful and forgiving
than ones that insist on documentary maintaining a specific relationship, through visual
or aural elements, with the reality it is allegedly representing. Moreover, it is not an
indeterminate distinction and it marks out a distinguishable difference between fiction
and nonfiction. Furthermore, the differentiation between representations of the world and
a world, together with an understanding that documentary is defined as much in the
perception of the viewer as from the intention of the producer, is broad enough to permit
the use of animation as a medium of documentary representation. Conversely, it is
8
specific enough to distinguish between an animation that is nonfictional and one that is
fictional.
Animation, it appears, is no less complex a term to define.
15
Just as John
Grierson’s interpretation of documentary has prevailed, so too has his one-time protégé’s
definition of animation. Norman McLaren stated that “animation is not the art of
drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.”
16
This is, as Maureen
Furniss points out, a definition of the essence, rather than the practice, of animation.
17

Furthermore, while attractively broad and encompassing, it is not altogether helpful in
understanding how, for example, animation is distinguished from live action cinema.
Here, Charles Solomon’s identification of two key factors inherent to animation is useful.
These are, firstly, that “the imagery is recorded frame-by-frame” and, secondly, that “the
illusion of motion is created, rather than recorded.”
18
This idea of frame-by-frame
manipulation and the construction of an illusion of motion is one that encompasses both
handmade and digitally produced animation. Furthermore, it encompasses the broad
range of techniques and styles that can be considered animation. As such, we can include
cel animation, puppet animation, claymation, three-dimensional computer generated
animation, and so on.
For the purpose of this study, then, an audiovisual work (produced by either
digital means or filmed onto celluloid film) will be considered an animated documentary
if it has: a) been recorded frame-by-frame in order to create a sense of motion; b) it is
about the world rather than a world wholly imagined by its creator; and finally, c) it has
been presented as a documentary by its producers and/or received as a documentary by
9
audiences, festivals, critics, and so on. As mentioned above, this dissertation is not
concerned with justifying the coexistence of animation and documentary in a single
work. The multiplicity of animated documentaries, screening venues for such films and
scholarly discussion (if not published writing) on this form has, I have suggested, taken
us beyond the point where we still need to argue their case and the discussion needs to
now become more nuanced.
There are, however, potential issues with this tripartite definition. The
distinction between a world wholly imaged by the creator and the world can become hard
to make with animated documentaries because the construction of animation necessarily
involves some degree of imagination. Furthermore, what proportion of a film must be
animated in order for it to qualify as an animated documentary? Strøm poses that an
animated documentary “could be ‘a documentary in which an extensive part – at least
fifty percent – is animated.’”
19
I would suggest, however, that a film’s classification as
an animated documentary is more complicated than what percentage of the finished
product comprises animation. This is a discussion I tackle in the first chapter of this
dissertation, in which I examine the difference between the historical tendency to include
animated sections in live action documentaries and the more recent convergence of
animation and documentary into a cohesive work that fully amalgamates the qualities of
documentary with the qualities of animation. By this determination, two films that
contain the same percentage of animation will not necessarily both be understood as
animated documentaries. Jonathan Hodgson’s Feeling My Way (1997) and Marjut
Rimminen and Päivi Takala’s Learned By Heart (2007), for example, both probably
10
contain less than fifty percent animation, but I am still classifying and discussing these
films as animated documentaries. Frank Capra’s World War Two propaganda series Why
We Fight (1942 - 1945) may contain a similar proportion of animation to these two films,
but is still being examined here as a documentary that contains animated sections, rather
than an animated documentary.
20

Geographically, this project attempts to take in a broad range of films. The
historical survey in chapter one, in particular, addresses films from around the world,
including US, UK, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and Canada. Elsewhere
I also discuss films from Australia, continental Europe and the Middle East. This is not,
however, intended to be a geographically comprehensive survey of global animated
documentary. Such a study is beyond the limits of this project. Neither is it claiming to
be a comprehensive study of all animated documentaries and there are many interesting
examples that I could not find the space to discuss here. Instead, I have chosen films that
articulate my argument regarding the challenges animated documentaries present to our
understanding and reception of documentary in general.
Chapter one gives a historical overview of the development of the animated
documentary since animation and documentary were first used in a single film at the
beginnings of the last century. The rest of this project, however, focuses on films from
the last twenty years. While the Hubleys were in the 1960s and 1970s making animated
documentaries using soundtracks of their children playing, they were most definitely
trailblazers.
21
The form, I would suggest, did not catch on until some time later with the
popularity and success of the shorts made by British animation studio Aardman
11
Animations. Aardman had been combining stop-motion animation of clay puppets with
documentary soundtracks since the late 1970s, but it was the critical and commercial
success of 1989’s Creature Comforts short that raised the profile of the studio and drew
attention to the creative possibilities for the convergence of animation and documentary.
In the intervening twenty years the animated documentary, in the way I understand it, has
proliferated and it is the films that make up part of this proliferation that are discussed in
this dissertation.

Modes, Structures, and Functions
It seems that the overwhelming inclination to subdivide documentary into different
modes or types has been transferred onto the study of animated documentaries. Several
authors have interpreted animated documentaries as falling within one of the six modes
of documentary production established by Bill Nichols.
22
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).
23
DelGaudio prefers to class animated documentaries within the
“reflexive” mode because, she claims, “animation itself acts as a form of
‘metacommentary’ within a documentary.”
24
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
12
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, the “performative documentary underscores
the complexity of our knowledge of the world by emphasizing its subjective and affective
dimensions.”
25
This seems a conceptualization that welcomes animation as a mode of
representation, not least because of the necessarily subjective nature of much of
animation production. Patrick identifies this appeal with his claim that “the very nature
of animation is to foreground its process and artifice.”
26
Furthermore, when Nichols 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 voice-over and even less 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. Furthermore, even if animation is doing
something live action cannot, it does not necessarily follow that the resulting film is
13
passing comment on the representational abilities of either approach. The assignment of
animated documentaries to the performative mode is, I contend, equally as limiting.
Nichols’ explanation of the performative mode is, at times, nebulous. While 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.”
27
This is a definition of the performative documentary that is far harder to
reconcile with animation.
28

We might question, then, how useful it is to try to fit animated documentaries into
Nichols’ modes of documentary production.
29
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.”
30
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 post-modern mode. Films in the imitative mode “directly
echo the dominant generic conventions of live-action documentary.”
31
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 voice-overs or by connecting to broader social issues through the individual
expression of the animator.
32
Ultimately, the subjective mode uses animation to “re-
14
constitute ‘reality’ on local and relative terms.”
33
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.”
34
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 post-
modern 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.”
35
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.”
36
This pursuit is
undermined, Wells contends, by the post-modern mode’s questioning of the possibility of
knowledge in itself.
Patrick adopts the notion of “structures” to categorize animated documentaries,
suggesting that “in making any kind of film, structure tends to be the skeleton that the
content lives on.”
37
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.
38
“The four structures encompass the range of possible approaches to
animated documentaries without initial regard to concept, techniques or aesthetics.”
39

Patrick takes a different conceptual approach to 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.
15
These films illustrate “events based on historical or personal evidence” and use this to
structure the storytelling.
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.”
41
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.”
42
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.
43
Patrick
dubs Wells’ fantastic mode as “expanded structure” because it “expands the possibilities
of the documentary form by transmuting the traditional storytelling method.”
44
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.”
45
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 taken to categorizing 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.”
46
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 serve much of a purpose
16
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 methods 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.”
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 a wholesale rejection of a connection between documentary and reality.
He characterizes this as a new trend in skepticism 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, his modes highlight
the supposed ineffectuality of conventional documentary representation (as in, live
17
action) to access or show reality. Furthermore, he suggests a teleology developing
towards the post-modern mode that ultimately questions the coherence of reality itself.
The existence of a postmodern crisis in documentary has, however, since been
debunked. Michael Renov points out that the targets of Carroll’s censure “rarely
addressed postmodernism in any direct way in [their] writings on documentary film.”
47

Renov counters that Carroll’s critique is a “documentary disavowal” that fails to
recognize that the form has long-since abandoned such rationalist goals as objective,
disinterested knowledge.
48
Instead, he suggests documentary is more often concerned
with “contingency, hybridity, knowledge as situated and particular, identity as ascribed
and performed.”
49
Renov’s words remind us that contemporary documentary studies
rarely questions the notion that the form coveys knowledge. Rather, the pertinent
questions are how this knowledge is conveyed and what type of knowledge it is.
As such, I would suggest that Wells’ modes of animated documentary are
entrenched in a now rejected postmodernist doubt regarding the viability of the
documentary project. It remains true, however, that there are different types of animated
documentaries that present their subject matter through a variety of styles and techniques.
Furthermore, animation is not used in the same way in all animated documentaries. It
may still be useful, therefore, to demarcate different types of animated documentaries.
One means of doing this is to consider how the animation functions. In other words,
what is the animation doing that the conventional alternative could not?
50
I believe this is
not just categorization for the sake of it, but rather a way to help understand how
animated documentaries work. In particular, sorting these films into categories of
18
functionality helps us understand what we learn from animated documentaries and how
we learn it. This, in turn, will aid consideration of whether, and if so how, the
epistemological status of the animated documentary differs from the non-animated
documentary and what the implications of such a difference are. By considering the
functionality of the animation along epistemological lines this is not an exercise in
postmodern doubt regarding the possibility that documentary can teach us something
about the world. Neither is it a by-product of questioning the existence of the real
altogether. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that animated documentaries are a subset of
Nichols’ reflexive mode. Rather, this process embraces the epistemological potentiality
of the documentary form by suggesting that animation has the capacity to enhance and
extend this potential.
One way that animation functions in animated documentaries is in a 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. Winsor
McCay’s 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania animates the torpedoing of that British
ocean liner by a German submarine, an event that drew America into World War One.
Similarly, the myriad animated educational and training films made by the Disney studios
during The Second World War use animation to demonstrate the workings of military
equipment. Disney also created the animated segments in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight
19
series (1942 – 45) with animated maps and charts that illustrated the Allies’ resistance to
the Axis Powers’ march across Europe and Asia.
More recent examples of substitutive animation can be seen in the BBC’s 1999
natural history series Walking With Dinosaurs and Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 (2007). In
Chicago 10, motion-capture and traditional animation is 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.
In both these more recent 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, therefore, animation functions as a kind of re-
enactment of historical event and this kind of animated documentary works very similarly
to a reconstruction documentary. In that, 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.”
20
There are other animated documentaries that also substitute animation for live-
action. However, whereas the animation in Chicago 10 and Walking With Dinosaurs
actually attempts to mimic the look of reality, these other films are not so constrained.
One example is Aardman’s Creature Comforts series, where animated, plasticine animals
express the words of human interviewees. In fact, there are several interview-style
documentaries in which a documentary soundtrack is loosely interpreted through
animated visuals. The 2002 Swedish film Hidden (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 both mimetic and non-mimetic substitution the animation could be considered
a creative solution to a problem – the absence of filmed material. In most of the
examples I have given so far the animation is overcoming limitations of a practical
nature. Filmed footage does not exist. The dinosaurs preceded the motion picture
camera by several millennia; no cameras were allowed in Judge Julius Hoffman’s
courtroom; there is no visual record of the interviews with the Swedish and Australian
child immigrants; and so on. In these examples, animation is one of many choices
available to the filmmaker who could, conceivably, have used another documentary
device such as reconstruction or archival footage. Often, too, there are ethical
considerations at play. The filmmakers of Hidden had a responsibility to protect the
anonymity of their child subject. In Liz Blazer’s Backseat Bingo (2003), about the sex
21
lives of senior citizens, she gained consent to interview her subjects on the promise that
they would not appear on camera.
51
In both cases animation becomes an alternative to
the silhouetted figure familiar from many television interview documentaries.
There is a third function of animation in animated documentaries that responds to
a different kind of representational limitation. Certain concepts, emotions, feelings and
states of mind are particularly difficult to represent through live action imagery.
Historically, filmmakers have used various optical devices such as wavy lines, blurring
the edges of the image and alterations of color palate and film stock to indicate the
representation of subjective states of mind. Similarly, certain camera angles inform the
audience that we are seeing the world from a certain character’s point of view.
Animation can be seen as a viable alternative that can reveal the inner lives and personal
points of view of experiences that have happened to real people in the world. In Feeling
My Way (1997) Jonathan Hodgson uses animation to communicate his train of thought on
his daily walking commute to work. Animated Minds (Andy Glynne, 2003) combines
animated visuals with a soundtrack on which an interviewee speaks of their experience of
living with mental illness. The style of animation reflects the experiences being
described on the soundtrack and gives us a visualization that aids our understanding of
these internal worlds.
These three functions – mimetic substitution, non-mimetic substitution and
interpretive – are the three key ways animation works in an animated documentary. This
is not to say, however, that there are not other ways in which animation can function in a
documentary context. To clarify, as mentioned above there are numerous historical and
22
contemporary examples of instances of animation being used in short and long-form
documentary films. Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine (2002), with its humorous
animated sections, is one more recent example. These types of films do not fall under my
understanding of an animated documentary because they do not represent the
convergence of animation and documentary into a single cohesive film that amalgamates
the qualities of both animation and documentary. This point is, in fact, further illustrated
by the way the animation functions in these documentaries. In Bowling for Columbine I
would suggest the animation works in an interjective way. That is, the function of the
animation is to interject into the live action in such a way to markedly contrast the
animated and the live action parts of the film. This is often intended for humorous,
satirical and ironic effect. The animation in Bowling for Columbine is effective because
the over-the-top South Park-style humor of these sections sits in contrast with the
somewhat serious subject matter (gun crime) of the film overall. The very fact that
animation is used in these films to interject suggests that these examples are not
demonstrating a cohesive convergence of the two forms.

Argument, Methodology and Chapter Summaries
In the case of mimetic substitution, in examples such as Chicago 10 and Walking With
Dinosaurs, the animation tends to be offering us knowledge of something that we could
have all seen, had we been alive in prehistoric times or a spectator in Judge Julius
Hoffman’s courtroom. This is, perhaps, the kind of knowledge that the documentary is,
traditionally, evidential of: knowledge that is out there, in the shared historical world,
23
which we all could have accessed equally if we were eyewitness to it. In non-mimetic
substitution, such as It’s Like That and the Creature Comforts shorts, the animation
begins to add something, to suggest things through its style and tone. It’s Like That
makes a point about the incarceration of innocents with the representation of the young
asylum seekers as soft, knitted birds. Similarly, Aardman are masters of emphasis and
irony, with their matching and mismatching of human voice and animated animal. This
shift away from the observable is furthered in the interpretive function. Pieces like
Feeling My Way and Animated Minds are, instead of pointing outwards, pointing inwards
towards the internal. These films, through the use of animation, are proposing
documentary’s ability and suitability to represent the world in here of personal
experience as well as the world out there of observable events. Extending on from this,
films that engage with the personal memories of the filmmakers, such as Waltz With
Bashir (Folman, 2008) and Silence (Yadin and Bringas, 1998), use animation as a tool to
explore and reveal hidden or forgotten pasts, demonstrating the medium’s capacity for
documenting the world from a subjective point of view.
As such, this dissertation is arguing that animated documentaries represent a shift
in, and broadening of, the epistemological limits of the documentary project. The
convergence of these two forms into a cohesive whole has expanded the epistemological
parameters of the documentary into realms that elude representation via live action or
photographic media. This is, I suggest, due to the completely malleable and manipulable
nature of animation. Furthermore, the very aspect of animation that might make some
hesitate in accepting this aesthetic approach as a suitable one for documentary – the lack
24
of a visual indexical link between profilmic and filmic – is an attribute that allows it to
expand the type of information conveyed through a documentary, and how that
communication occurs. The epistemological shift is, therefore, enabled by the dialectic
of absence-excess that is (dis)embodied by animation, and animated documentaries in
particular.
John Ellis has noted the present-absence in the photographic and film.
The cinema image is marked by a particular half-magic feat in that it
makes present something that is absent. The moment shown on the screen
is passed and gone when it is called back into being as illusion. The
figures and places shown are not present in the same space as the viewer.
The cinema makes present the absent: this is the irreducible separation that
cinema maintains (and attempts to abolish), the fact that objects and
people are conjured up yet known not to be present. Cinema is present
absence: it says ‘This is was.’
52

As such, cinema always calls on the spectator to make an epistemological leap of faith in
order to engage with the images we see on screen. This leap requires the suspension of
disbelief and a temporary denial of knowledge of the (im)materiality of the film image.
Animated documentaries extend and expand this tension between presence and absence
to a dialectical relationship between absence and excess.
Raymond Williams tells us that a Hegelian understanding of the dialectical
process is one of “the continual unification of opposites, in the complex relation of parts
to a whole.”
53
The animated documentary can be thought of as engendering a dialectical
process both in terms of aesthetics and reception. Animation and documentary, nominal
opposites in terms of the materiality and ontology of their methods of production and
images so produced, are unified in a coherent whole. This process, furthermore, asks us
to negotiate the absence (of conventional visually indexical material) and excess (of the
25
animation aesthetic, which is often highly non-realistic and/or symbolic). Through this
negotiation we are presented a rich and complex viewing experience that broadens the
epistemological capacities of the documentary.
This suggestion regarding the epistemological widening of the documentary
domain via the dialectical relationship between absence and excess in animated
documentaries is presented in five chapters that explore different aspects of the argument.
The primarily methodological approach is textual analysis of a variety of examples that
are examined through a variety of theoretical paradigms. Appropriate, specific animated
documentaries are used to elucidate the topic and argument of each chapter. It is not the
case, however, that each example is necessarily mutually exclusive to the chapter within
which it is discussed. Similarly, many of the films discussed do not display only one of
the functions of animation within a non-fiction context, which were discussed above. So,
for example, a film could use animation in both a substitutive and an interpretive way.
There is a fluidity in how animation is used and how its use can be interpreted, a
characteristic that amplifies, I would suggest, its suitability for conveying the subjective
and the personal.
Chapter one sets the foundation for the main argument of the dissertation in
looking at the historical precedent for the convergence of animation and documentary and
presents an overview of the cross-pollination of these two forms since the early 1900s.
As such, this chapter provides the evidence for the claims made above regarding the
contemporary convergence of animation and documentary into one form by comparing it
to earlier hybrids of the two. Once the historical background of the meeting of animation
26
and documentary has been established, the main argument of the dissertation is expressed
in the following three chapters. In these I trace a trajectory from mimetic substitution to
interpretation that demonstrates how animation shifts and expands the documentary’s
epistemological potential. As such, chapter two examines examples of computer-
generated animated documentaries that exemplify the function of mimetic substitution.
These films utilize computer techniques to mimic the look of reality and photoreality. As
such, they question whether it is the indexical link with reality that gives documentary its
evidential weight or, rather, the look of indexicality. In addressing this issue, this chapter
interrogates the conflation of the ontology of photographic technology and the aesthetics
of cinematic realism. This discussion is informed by a reading of Bazin’s theories on the
nature of photography and throws into new light his claims regarding our psychological
desires that drive us towards increasingly realistic representations of the world.
In chapter three I look at interview documentaries that utilize animation in a non-
mimetic substitutive way. That is, films that comprise oral/aural documentary material in
the form of an interview with a subject and combine this with animated visuals that are
not necessarily attempting to mimic the look of reality. This chapter engages with the
question of what happens when the body of the interviewee is physically absent.
Furthermore, I explore the power and potential of the voice in documentary interviews
and how this issue is nuanced by the absence of the body and the excess of the animated
aesthetic. I suggest that the analyzed films’ use of animation goes beyond a simple
substitution for missing live-action material in beginning to explore the symbolic
potential of animation to give insight into the words we hear on the soundtrack.
27
Furthermore, I propose that this insight is evoked by the dialectical relationship between
the elements of animation and documentary.
The fourth chapter of this dissertation explores animated documentaries in which
the animation functions in an interpretive way to evoke knowledge of other people’s
subjectivity. Many of the films discussed in this chapter seek to convey the experience of
mental illness or other specific mental states ranging from autism to the train of thought
of a pedestrian walking his regular route to work. They achieve this, I argue, through
exploiting the evocative potential of animation to facilitate our imagination of another’s
internal world. Furthermore, I contend that these films demonstrate the particular
suitability of animation to this task of ‘documenting’ the internal. In so doing they also
imply the epistemological limitation of conventional documentary strategies such as
testimony and indexical imagery for conveying the subjective.
Chapter five, which can be thought of as a coda to the main argument of the
dissertation, extends the ideas developed over the previous three chapters. In particular,
it applies some of the suggestions of chapter four to an examination of animated films
that work as personal memoirs. As such, I discuss how animation enters into the
discourse regarding photography’s relationship with historical representation. The films
discussed offer an autobiographical perspective and articulate an intersection between
developments in documentary and the relatively new discipline of memory studies.
Autobiographical animation, I suggest, can be a potent tool for recalling a past that has
either been forgotten or repressed. Furthermore, by inserting the self into the past and re-
imagining public history from a personal perspective these films become a means of
28
challenging hegemonic systems of power. Ultimately, I claim that animation is an
antidote to the fissured and fragmented notion of the past that is exemplified by the
relationship between photography and the history. Instead, animation becomes a way to
knit oneself into history and make continuities with the past. Animation, moreover, goes
beyond merely re-presenting the past to convey the significance of both personal history
and the act of (dis)remembering it.

The word ‘animation’ has its roots in the Latin animare, to give life to. To
animate, literally translated, means “to breathe life into, endow with life, … quicken,
vivify.”
54
Indeed, in common parlance to describe someone or something as ‘animated’
is to indicate a sense of life and liveliness, energy and motion. Alan Cholodenko has
suggested that animation offers the potential to re-theorize film and film theory through
an acknowledgement its “animatic” possibilities.
55
Animation, he claims, has a
performative capacity to enliven our understanding of film, as well as animation itself,
through a refusal of static or binary models.
While, in this project, I am not adopting wholesale Cholodenko’s theoretical
paradigm, I am at least embracing the spirit of his notion of the animatic in my study of
animated documentary. As such, I am proposing that animation has the capacity to bring
new life to documentary, to re-energize it. Furthermore, as well as animation vivifying
the documentary form, there is a concomitant theoretical implication. Through the
convergence of animation and documentary our theoretical understanding of how
documentary works and, in particular, its epistemological status, is questioned.
29
Animation, as such, begets a refiguring, or mobilization, of both documentary and
documentary studies.

30
Introduction Endnotes

1
Renov, “Animation: Documentary’s Imaginary Signifier;” Strøm, “The Animated
Documentary.”

2
Strøm 48.

3
Patrick, “Representing Reality: Structural/Conceptual Design in Non-Fiction Animation,” 37.

4
Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 29.

5
Grierson, “The Documentary Producer,” 8.

6
Winston, Claiming the Real, 11.

7
Ibid., 12.

8
Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, 16.

9
Ibid.

10
Vaughan, For Documentary, 58.

11
See Ward Documentary: The Margins of Reality 30.

12
See Stella Bruzzi New Documentary, 2
nd
ed., 7.

13
Ward, 30. Emphasis in original.

14
Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, xi.

15
As evidence by the lively debate that took place on the Animation Studies listserv email group
in May 2008. http://gertie.animationstudies.org/.

16
Norman McLaren, quoted in Furniss, Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, 5.

17
Ibid.

18
Charles Solomon, quoted in Furniss, 5.

19
Strøm, 49.

20
As it is, it is hard to know exactly how one would measure the ‘percentage’ of animation in
many films under discussion in this dissertation. A simple equation calculated on screen time
would not suffice as many of the films use layering, collage and montage techniques to combine
animation and live action in a single frame.

31

21
See chapter one for a discussion of the Hubleys’ work.

22
Nichols initially suggested four modes: the expository, the observational, the interactive and the
reflexive. He later added the poetic and the performative and re-named the interactive as the
participatory mode. See Nichols, Representing Reality; Blurred Boundaries; Introduction to
Documentary.

23
He gives A is for Autism (Tim Webb, 1992) and Snack and Drink (Bob Sabiston, 1999) as
examples. Both of these films are discussed in chapter four.

24
DelGaudio, 192.

2525
Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 131.

26
Patrick, 38.

27
Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 131.

28
See chapter three for further discussion of embodiment in animated documentaries.
29
This implies a further question of how useful the modes are in general, one that is beyond the
scope of this project.

30
Wells, “The Beautiful Village and the True Village,” 41.

31
Ibid., 41.

32
Ibid., 43.

33
Ibid., 44.

34
Ibid.

35
Ibid.

36
Ibid., 45.

37
Patrick, 39.

38
Ibid.

39
Ibid.

40
Ibid., 40.

41
Ibid.

32

42
ibid., 41.

43
Ibid.

44
Ibid., 42.

45
Ibid., 43.

46
Ibid., 45.

47
Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 137.

48
Ibid.

49
Ibid.

50
By ‘conventional alternative’ I mean the types of photo-based media familiar to documentary,
such as observational filming, archival footage, reconstruction, interviews, photographs, and so
on.

51
Although once they had seen the finished film they agreed to their photographs appearing in its
credits. Liz Blazer, email message to author, February 17, 2009.

52
Ellis, Visible Fictions, 58-59.

53
Williams, Keywords, rev. ed., 107.

54
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2
nd
ed., s.v. “Animate,” http://dictionary.oed.com.
libproxy.usc.edu/cgi/entry/50008710?query_type=word&queryword=animate&first=
1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&search_id=n7rK-svGJML-4128&result_place
=1/ (accessed June 25 2009).

55
See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” in Illusion of Life II, esp. 43-44.

33
CHAPTER I
BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES: THE HISTORICAL PRECEDENT FOR THE
CONVERGENCE OF ANIMATION AND DOCUMENTARY

Introduction
While animated documentaries have become increasingly prevalent since the mid-1980s,
the hybridization of animation and documentary is not, in itself, particularly new. In fact,
these two media forms have been intermingling since their very earliest days. Two
tendencies can be traced, arising concurrently, from the two fields. Animators such as
Winsor McCay, Walt Disney and Len Lye used their art to explore non-fiction subject
matter. Animated sections can also be seen in documentary films from the 1930s
onwards, from the animated maps in Frank Capra’s World War Two propaganda series,
Why We Fight (1942-45), to the humorous animated interludes in Michael Moore’s
Bowling for Columbine (2002).
This chapter explores the historical trends of cross-pollination between these two
apparently antithetical media forms. It would be tempting to attempt to trace a neat linear
history, that takes us from the often dubbed ‘first animated’ documentary made by
Winsor McCay in 1918 to the examples examined in the following chapters. However, a
closer examination of the precedent for the mixing of animation and documentary reveals
a more convoluted trajectory. Thus, instead of tracing a linear genealogy along which
contemporary animated documentaries are descended through a direct line of inheritance,
this task demands a more nuanced approach.

34
In Remediation Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin cite a Foucaultian concept of
genealogy in making a connection between new and old media technologies and
practices. As such, they seek out “historical affiliations or resonances and not origins”
and adapt Foucault’s application of genealogy to relations of power to “formal relations
within and among media.”
1
Thomas Elsaessar, on the other hand, rejects the concept of
genealogy altogether in favor of the notion of archaeology in his examination of the
relationship between new media and the early cinema.
2
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
that only the presumption of discontinuity and the synecdoche of the
fragment can hope to give a present access to its past.
3

Elsaessar maps film history as a network, rather than “discrete units,” and as such, he is
drawing attention to Foucault’s claim that history is not continuous, but is rather a
process of breaks, mutations and transformations.
4

Just as Bolter and Grusin and Elsaessar point to the folly of examining new media
technologies as discrete from the history of cinema and visual arts, so too one would 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 history of animated
documentaries must be mapped as a network of both interweaving and independent
threads. If we think of animated documentaries as a ‘new media,’ relative to the ‘old
media’ of animation and documentary, then this chapter reveals a history of mutual
enrichment. What it also reveals is the wide variety the historical hybridization of these
two forms takes. Animation has long been used in documentary films for clarity,
35
illustration and emphasis. It has also been used to create a safe surface meaning for
subversive material, masking a direct connection to the socio-political world with its
ostensible inoffensiveness. Similarly, the documentary context has provided an arena for
experimentation with the animated form.
Ultimately, however, this study shows the intertwined history of animation and
documentary 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,” this history of the overlaps
between animation and documentary is not looking for continuities.
5
There is no single
beginning (indeed, as will be shown, Winsor McCay’s film was not the first meeting
between animation and documentary), but rather many concurrent, international
examples can be found that demonstrate the instinct that documentary can be
strengthened by the addition of animation, and vice versa. Similarly there is no terminal
point towards which this history progresses. Early tendencies such as the substitution of
animation for missing live action material and the use of animation in educational
documentaries can still be seen today. Furthermore, we still frequently see moments of
animated interjection in conventional live action documentaries. As such, not all
contemporary concurrent occurrences of animation and documentary result in the types
of animated documentaries I am discussing later in this dissertation. Not all
documentaries that use animation and not all animations that relate to the real world

36
exemplify the evidential shift I argue many contemporary animated documentaries
exhibit.
In recognition of the web-like history of the intersection of animation and
documentary, this chapter is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Thus,
after an examination of the ‘first animated documentary,’ Winsor McCay’s The Sinking
of the Lusitania, this study progresses via animation’s use in wartime informational and
training films through the use of animation in more general educational films. The
production of animated films within the state sponsored documentary units in the UK and
Canada segues to the allegorical animated films made prolifically in Eastern Europe after
the end of the Second World War before addressing the groundbreaking work of United
Productions of America and John and Faith Hubley. The echoes of these earlier
tendencies to combine animation and documentary can be heard throughout the films
discussed over the following chapters. As such, this chapter enriches the study of
contemporary animated documentaries without pretending to offer a simple, clear lineage
between the forms’ hybridization and their current convergence.

The First Animated Documentary? Winsor McCay and The Sinking of the
Lusitania
Winsor McCay’s 1918 film about the fatal torpedoing of the British passenger liner
Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 is widely quoted as being the ‘first animated
documentary.’
6
In fact, as will be discussed below, there are earlier examples of the
application of animation to non-fictional scenarios. However, while The Sinking of the
37
Lusitania takes certain liberties with the facts, the film was one of the first examples of
the animation of a real, historical event and could, perhaps, be better described as the first
animated reconstruction. It was certainly the first non-fictional animation to be released
commercially and shown to the general public. Up to this point, the early pioneers of
animation had focused their attention on the humorous and light-hearted and this set the
tone for much of early animation.
7
McCay’s previous work featured high jinks with a
docile, cat-like dinosaur called Gertie and the fantastical adventures of the dreamland-
dwelling boy, Nemo. He was also known for flamboyant performances in his vaudeville
act where he interacted with his animation and completed lightning sketches on stage.
8

Gunnar Strom has noted that many early animated films comprised live action footage of
an animator performing lightning sketches and, as such, can be thought of as an early
hybridization of animation and documentary.
9

John Canemaker points out that while The Sinking of the Lusitania “did not
revolutionize the film cartoons of its time, the film was a milestone in the demonstration
of the alternatives available to the creative animation filmmaker.”
10
While this film was
a continuation of McCay’s “fundamental working premise of animating subjects [which]
could not possibly be filmed” it also demonstrated the potential for animation to depict
non-fiction subjects that were usually the reserve of actuality films and newsreels.
11

McCay’s turn to more serious fare was motivated by his shock at the death of innocent
civilians, many of whom were American, at the hands of the Germans and the film was,
amongst other things, a propagandistic battle-cry for America’s entry into the First World
War. As no original footage or photographs of the disaster existed, McCay’s only option
38
was to recreate the events, as re-told by the survivors, using animation. His aesthetic
approach to the material was modified, due to the nature of the subject matter, from his
usual animation style, and McCay called on his previous experience as an artist-reporter
at the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune.
12
As Donald Crafton points out, the film’s
“documentary character called for a more realistic graphic style, so the detailed
crosshatching, the washes, and the spatter techniques of the Hearst editorial illustrations
were used.”
13
In this way, the look of The Sinking of the Lusitania copied the “popular
illustrated re-enactments of accidents, which appeared in American and European
newspapers of the time.”
14
McCay also emulated the editing structure familiar from
newsreels through a structure of alternating animated sequences that simulated ‘shots’ of
the events. This emulation was clearly effective as the film was included in the Universal
Weekly newsreel shown in theatres.
15

The twelve-minute film took two painstaking years to produce and 25,000
individual drawings. This was despite McCay employing the new laborsaving process of
drawing the characters on celluloid, instead of rice paper, which meant that the
backgrounds no longer had to be re-drawn on each sheet, or frame.
16
The film was
released in July 1918 and was melodramatically promoted by the production company as
‘the picture that will never have a competitor – will burn in your heart forever! Winsor
McCay’s Blood Stirring Pen Picture – the World’s Only Record of the Crime that
Shocked Humanity!’
17
The film was favorably reviewed, in the UK at least, where it was
heralded by Bioscope as “one of the greatest attractions ever offered on the open
market.”
18
However, despite the journal’s wholehearted recommendation of the film
39
“most cordially to every exhibitor,” The Sinking of the Lusitania, which McCay
personally funded, was not a financial success, earning only $80,000, or $3.20 per
drawing.
19

The film begins with a live-action prologue where we see McCay preparing to
make the images for the film with the help of Mr. Beach, a reporter from the Hearst
newspapers who was the first to interview the surviving passengers of the Lusitania. We
then see McCay and his colleagues setting to work on the film and are told via an
intertitle that the first images completed were those of the moving sea. This information
is followed by an animated image of an empty ocean, with gently lapping waves. An
intertitle telling us “From here on you are looking at the first record of the sinking of the
Lusitania” segues us from the live-action to the animated portion of the film. This type
of live-action introduction to the ‘main feature’ of McCay’s animation is familiar from
his earlier films and acts as a kind of documentary of the film’s making. However, the
revelation of the production process, including detailed information such as exactly how
many individual pictures it took to make the film, stands in strange contrast to the film’s
proclamation of itself as a genuine “record” of the events. Rather than questioning
animation’s viability as a documentary tool, this opening section subtextually claims that
animation is as suited as live action film to the task of a newsreel. Comments in reviews
of the film, such as “we witness the whole tragedy, from the moment of the first attack to
the heartrending ending,” suggest an unproblematic reception of animation as a suitable
medium for an actuality subject.
20

40
During the main section of the film animated images alternate with intertitles.
The title cards range in tone from the informative to the hyperbolic, the latter revealing
the film’s underlying call-to-arms. Even before we see the animated record of events we
are told that Germany had “already benumbed the world with its wholesale killing” and
the torpedoing of the Lusitania was a treacherous and cowardly offense.” One of the
final titles, which rails “The man who fired the shot was decorated for it by the Kaiser! –
AND YET THEY TELL US NOT TO HATE THE HUN,” leaves little doubt as to the
filmmaker’s opinion or the message of the film. This xenophobia is also articulated in
one animated sequence in which silhouetted figures are seen on top of the German U-39
submarine celebrating the successful torpedo strike. The Germans are painted as cold-
hearted and callous, in comparison to the innocent victims of the attack, whom we later
see throwing themselves in desperation from the stern of the sinking ship.
In general, the film restricts itself to points of view that mirror those of an
imaginary eyewitness, watching the events from a distance. The submarine and the
Lusitania are mostly seen in ‘long shots’ that take in the vessels from either side-on or
head-on angles. This allows us, for example, to watch the slow but inevitable
disappearance of the large ocean liner after the second torpedo strikes. This sequence is
long and drawn-out, as if to evoke witnessing the event in real time. Later, McCay draws
us into the tragedy of the event by alternating medium shots and close-ups with these
long shots, such as when we see a half-released lifeboat full of passengers break free of
its ropes and plummet towards the sea as the second torpedo hits. Later, when the
Lusitania has sunk, we see small heads bobbing in the foreground sea, their features just
41
discernible. The implications of the attack are reiterated in the middle-section of the film.
Directly after the first torpedo strikes the boat and we see animated clouds of black
smoke billowing from its fore, we are informed that men of “worldwide prominence”
were among those who perished. We then see still photographs of these men, who
included philosophers, playwrights and multi-millionaire Alfred G. Vanderbilt. This
interjection of photographs in the middle of the film acts to remind us of its documentary
claims and its connection to the world rather than the imaginary world customary of
animated films.
The journalistic approach is abandoned in two notable moments where McCay
indulges his more creative inclinations and affords us a perspective from underneath the
waves. At one point we see two alarmed looking fish rapidly swim out of the frame to
the left as a torpedo comes juggernauting through the water towards us. Later, after the
Lusitania has sunk, a mother pitifully sinks down into the ocean and loses grip of her
small baby, who floats away out of her grasp. These two sequences do not copy the types
of shots that could have been filmed by an eyewitness camera and these moments of
creative flourish that stray beyond the look and feel of a newsreel highlight the biased
nature of this “record of events.” Paul Wells points out The Sinking of the Lusitania has
more in common with tabloid journalism and propaganda than the objective, measured
approach that might be expected from a conventional historical documentary.
21

However, perhaps McCay’s clarion call is an early example of the fallacy of the
presumption, or goal, of documentary objectivity and a demonstration that the form can
make an argument and have a strong point of view.
42
Canemaker suggests The Sinking of the Lusitania was “far ahead of its time” and
that McCay saw “beyond the sensibilities of the men rapidly turning out simple gag
cartoons starring clowns, cats, dogs and kids.”
22
We might contend that McCay gained
extra mileage, in terms of the message he wanted to hammer home regarding the
Germans’ behavior, through the juxtaposition of medium and subject. Until he made The
Sinking of the Lusitania animation generally fell into two camps: the humorous or the
abstract. That animation had previously been utilized for entertainment or artistic
experimentation might have led to an added shock factor that this medium was being
used to depict such a somber and tragic true-life story. McCay expanded the boundaries
of animation by turning his pen to a serious, factual subject. He also demonstrated the
capacity of animation to express opinion and make a compelling argument. Furthermore,
in this animated reenactment of historical events, we see the beginnings of the tendency
to use animation to substitute for live-action, in this case because no photographic
evidence existed of the original events. This tendency still continues today and is
discussed in the next chapter.

Drawing the Battle Lines: Wartime Animation
As mentioned above, there are earlier examples than The Sinking of the Lusitania
of the application of animation to non-fictional scenarios. While McCay’s film was the
first non-fictional animation to be commercially released, there were earlier instructional
films made for training purposes that would have been seen by limited and specific
groups of people. For example, British filmmaker Percy Smith made a series of films
43
that used animated maps to depict battles of the First World War. In Fight for the
Dardanelles (1915) Smith used stop-motion animation to illustrate the battle for control
of this strait of water in Turkey that separates Europe from Asia. Small cardboard cutout
ships are maneuvered around a map and clouds of cotton wool are used to denote
explosions.
23
In the US, the animation pioneer and studio-head John Randolph Bray
received a request from the military to make training films. Bray sent along one of his
top animators, Max Fleischer, to do the job. Along with draftsman Jack Leventhal,
Fleischer produced many training films until the armistice in 1918.
24
Their films, which
included extensive animation, were the first army training films produced, and they
covered hundreds of different subjects.
25
For example, in 1917, the year before McCay
made The Sinking of the Lusitania, Fleischer made a series of films (including How to
Read an Army Map and How to Fire a Lewis Gun) that were used to train American
soldiers heading to the battle zones in Europe.
As Richard Shale has noted, the animation in the early American military films
was “used to clarify points which could not be adequately illustrated by live
photography.”
26
The realization 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 and military in the Second World War. Prior to America’s entry into the
Second World War, John Grierson had remarked at animation’s potential for education
after seeing a speculative employee training film made by Walt Disney for the Lockheed
Aircraft Corporation.
27
Disney made Four Methods of Flush Riveting in 1940 and it was
screened at a conference held in 1941 to debate the potential application of animation in a
44
non-entertainment capacity. Grierson, who was then head of the National Film Board of
Canada (NFBC), was present at the conference and was so impressed with the film he
suggested that every time a new piece of equipment was delivered, an animated training
film should go with it. He also surmised “animation seems to have a capacity for
simplifying the presentation of pedagogical problems as documentary films have not.”
28

The conference led the NFBC to commission Disney to make an instructional film and
four trailers promoting the purchase of war savings certificates. With this commission,
the Canadians were much swifter to adopt the use of animation for training and education
than the Americans. Before the US entered the war, the government had requested that
Disney include more topical references in their entertainment cartoons, a request that was
only partially fulfilled. However, on 8
th
December 1941, one day after the attack on
Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, Disney received his first commission from the US
government.
29
The initial twenty training films for the Navy on identifying aircraft and
warships led to subsequent productions on behalf of the Army Signal Corps, the Army
Air Force, the Air Transport Command and other service branches. By 1943 ninety-four
percent of the studio’s output went to fulfill their contracts to the government and the
military.
30

The look and structure of these training films was established in the Four
Methods of Flush Riveting and the one instructional film made for the NFBC. Flush
Riveting is a somewhat dry ten-minute animated lecture. An authoritative voice-of-god
commentary guides us through four different methods of riveting (such as the
“countersink method” and the “double-dimple”) designed to minimize turbulence by
45
reducing drag on the aircraft surface. The clearly drawn and labeled images of the
riveting process are animated on a plain blue background and the look of the film is akin
to textbook diagrams put into motion. Stop That Tank (1942) takes a more lighthearted
approach to the instruction of the workings and use of the MK-1 anti-tank rifle. Also in
color, the film begins with an animated section in which a caricatured Hitler is thwarted
by the anti-tank gun and catapulted down into hell, where he wails and whines at “being
oppressed.” Hitler is drawn as a sallow, belching figure with a protruding red nose and
the cartoon high jinks and lively music are familiar from Disney’s entertainment shorts.
The film segues into more serious territory via a live-action sequence in which we see a
demonstration of the gun in use. An extended animated lecture on the functions of the
gun and techniques, such as loading and cleaning, follows. The tone here is familiar from
Flush Riveting and the implication is that animation can reveal and explain details more
clearly than live action with the narrator’s invitation to observe the inner workings of the
rifle “through the magic of x-ray animation.”
As well as making many training films targeted at military personnel, Disney also
made films aimed at rallying the public into supporting the war effort. The format and
tone of these films was also established with the NFBC work, in this case the four trailers
promoting war savings certificates. The military training films tended to be serious in
tone and rarely used the popular characters from the Disney stable as the time it took to
make the character-based films was precluded by the rapidity with which the studio was
required to output the training shorts.

For the same reasons, as well as to minimize cost,
these films were generally produced in black and white. The educational shorts intended
46
for commercial release, on the other hand, were more entertaining and often featured
familiar characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Pluto the dog presented in
vibrant Technicolor. In two of the NFBC shorts Disney even re-purposed already
successful films and shorts, playing on the popularity of this material. Seven Wise
Dwarfs (1941) starts with the diamond mine sequence from Disney’s first feature Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But instead of hi-hoing themselves back to their
cottage, the dwarfs march off to the nearest Post Office, singing “hi-ho, hi-ho, we all
must help you know; we’ll win the war with 5-for-4, hi-ho, hi-ho.”
31
Thrifty Pig (1941)
re-uses the opening sequences and popular song from The Three Little Pigs cartoon
(1933), but here the Big Bad Wolf is clearly Hitler/ Nazism in disguise and the third pig’s
house is bolstered against his invasive huffing and puffing by bricks made of savings
certificates. The character-led animation in both these films then leads into a more
serious animated prologue in which the message of the film (to buy war savings
certificates) is hammered home in direct, graphic animation. A bomber plane strafes out
“INVEST IN VICTORY” and the words “BUY MORE AND MORE WAR SAVINGS
CERTIFICATES” bestride the screen in authoritative block letters.
This two-part structure of entertainment-plus-education was used in the
commercially released educational films made for the US government during the War. In
The New Spirit (1942) and The Spirit of ’43 (1943), Donald Duck helps educate the
public on how to file income taxes. The importance of this money for the war effort is
emphasized in the second half of the short, where we see the uses to which income taxes
are put. The public was also educated about domestic affairs that could help win the war.
47
In Out of the Frying Pan and into the Firing Line (1942) Minnie and Pluto learn that
leftover cooking grease can be donated to the war effort. The Winged Scourge (1943)
warns of the dangers of malaria, and includes sections with the seven dwarfs. This film
was made by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and was
commissioned by the British to screen in India during monsoon season.
32

In all of the Disney war education and training films, animation is used for both
clarity and resonance. A serious message is sweetened coming from a familiar, friendly
character such as Minnie or Donald Duck, and complicated concepts and explanations are
clarified through moving illustrations and graphic representation. Symbolism, something
to which animation easily lends itself, is used to underline a point, such as when Donald
grapples with his thrifty and spendthrift consciences over whether to save or spend his
wages in The Spirit of ’43. The spendthrift-Donald leans louchely on the swastika-
shaped swing doors of a saloon bar, inviting Donald in, until the duck’s thrifty voice wins
through and Donald smashes the spendthrift through the doors, destroying the swastika
emblem in the process. Disney also capitalized on one of animation’s unique
characteristics to emphasize the message of the films. Metamorphosis, or the seamless
transition of one shape, or character, into another, is used to help the audience make
mental connections. In Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Firing Line the drips of fat
straining through a funnel morph into cannon shells and a globule of meat dripping turns
into a bomb that sinks an Axis warship. These instances of metamorphosis act as visual
cues to aid the audience in associating their domestic cooking waste with the weaponry
that will win the War.
48
During the Second World War the Hollywood studios were commissioned to
produce a vast number of animated training and propaganda films. Disney created the
lion’s share of this output, turning out 300,000 feet of film for the government and
military during the war.
33
However, all the animation studios accepted government
commissions and the high demand for animated training films enabled some animators,
such as Hugh Harman, to open their own small studios.
34
The military also had their own
production arms to produce in-house films. The Army Air Force’s First Motion Picture
Unit (FMPU) set-up in 1942 and quickly established an animation department headed by
Rudy Ising from MGM.
35
Their animated education shorts often featured dim-witted
characters that learned techniques such as accurate shooting at enemy planes and the
importance of camouflage. Through these characters’ trials, errors and eventual
successes, the target audience of military personnel also became better equipped to deal
with technical and practical issues on the front line of battle.
While the FMPU made most of their animation in-house, another Army film
production unit, headed by Frank Capra, tended to farm out this task to already-existing
animation studios.
36
In 1942, Capra commissioned Disney to provide the animated
sections for a series of propaganda films he was making for military personnel about to
be sent into combat. Why We Fight is a series of seven films made by Capra between
1942 and 1945. The films combine stock footage and animation accompanied by a
didactic voiceover explaining the war aims and America’s reasons for reversing its
previous isolationist policy. For the most part the animation is used to illustrate and
clarify information. Moving diagrams, maps and charts bring statistics to life and make
49
the parameters of the War, and the consequences of defeat, easier to understand. For
example, in The Nazis Strike (1942), an extended sequence illustrates how German forces
overwhelmed Poland as multiple animated black tanks smother Polish cities demarcated
on a map. Frequently throughout the series brief moments of animation visualize factual
information, such as the numerical symbols accompanied by animated little airplanes that
are stacked up to compare relative British and German losses in the air battles during The
Battle of Britain (1943). A common feature to all of the films in the series is the
foreboding black arrows on maps to indicate lines of enemy attack. What this use of
animation demonstrates is the notion, observed by Edward Tufte, that envisioned
information is easier to understand and retain.
37
Furthermore, animation can encapsulate
and communicate this information more efficiently than the spoken word. Pictures, so
the saying goes, speak a thousand words.
The Why We Fight series also utilizes animation for emphasis and visual
association. In the first film, Prelude to War (1942), the narrator describes the symbols
of the foreign enemies while we see maps of the countries morph into these symbols.
Thus, the sign of the swastika is associated with the geographical location of Germany in
a simple and efficient way. In a later film, Divide and Conquer (1943), we see a hoard of
mini swastikas swarm over a castle drawn on the French map, “ready to crumble” at this
termite-like invasion.
38
Thus, France’s submission to the German army is drawn out in
symbolic form. Simplicity in the symbolism prevails throughout the series, with the
pitting of dark hues for enemy nations against paler colors for the Allies. This is
established in the series’ first animated sequence when, in Prelude to War, we see dark,
50
black inky stains spreading across Japan, Italy and Germany as the narrator notes the
cultural differences between these countries and the US. As James Elkins has pointed
out, “the real subjects of maps usually … serve territorial, religious, or nationalist
agendas.”
39
The 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.
We can surmise that the delivery of both information and a strong message
through animation was a successful approach, as Disney repeated it in 1943 in the more
elaborate, feature-length Victory Through Air Power. This was based on the best-selling
book of the same name written by Major Alexander P. de Seversky, a Russian-born
naturalized American citizen who flew in the US Navy and was a pioneer of aviation
strategy. Seversky’s book advocated the adoption of long-range bombers by the Navy, a
tactic that would reduce the dependency on overseas air bases and would, according to
Seversky, see the US gain a strategic advantage in the War. Walt Disney agreed with this
argument that suggested an alternative to the current use of the Naval air fleet as support
and cover for ground- and sea-based military operations and produced and released the
film version within a year of Seversky’s book coming out. Unlike Disney’s previous
wartime shorts, Victory Through Air Power was self-funded, rather than financed through
a military contract.
40
This was, in part, because Disney was arguing against the
prevailing wisdom in the US military regarding the use of the naval air force. The film
was also intended for commercial release to the public, rather than the shorts, whose first
audience was military personnel.
51
Victory Through Air Power combines many of the elements of Disney’s previous
non-fiction work and is presented in vibrant Technicolor. Described by the distributor,
United Artists, as “based on realistic fact,” the film was intended to both educate and
entertain and to “give a dramatic and exciting picture of the airplane” that would “show
better than the written word ever could just how planes can bring the Axis powers to their
knees.”
41
An amusing and light-hearted animated history of aviation is followed by more
serious sections that deliver Seversky’s message. Animated, illustrative maps intersperse
live action sequences in which Seversky delivers an informal lecture about the
importance of air power in winning the War. The use of dynamic maps is familiar from
Why We Fight, although their design and presentation is more sophisticated in this film.
Color helps make the maps engaging and detailed shading and drawing is used to give an
illusion of 3-dimension by adding topographical features. In one section, where the
reasons for Europe’s failure to resist Hitler’s advance are explained, blue arrows
indicating the movement of the British Royal Navy to block off Hitler’s supply lines
morph into a line of warships that surround the coastline. There are also frequent
animated realizations of the topics being discussed by both Seversky and the narrator of
the film, where animated scenes bring to life the described scenarios. When Seversky
tells us of the futility of France’s outdated focus on land defense that ignores the potential
of an air attack, we see a line of armored, machine-gun turrets in an overgrown field.
Mist shrouds the scene and a bird makes its nest in one of the gun barrels as German
planes fly overhead. Later, the superiority of air power is illustrated when planes morph
into an iron shield protecting the boats during the Dunkirk evacuation.
52
The film was mostly well-received by the critics, described by some as
“brilliantly conceived” and lauded as a demonstration to documentary producers of how
to combine education and entertainment.
42
More importantly, Seversky and Disney
realized their aims with Victory Through Air Power when British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, who was impressed with the film, recommended it to Roosevelt and,
subsequently, the US adopted the tactic of long range bombing.
43
This potential for
animation to help succinctly and convincingly deliver an argument through illustration
and symbolism was exploited in the many animated propaganda shorts released during
the War. With these films the US government recognized the possibilities within
animation to sway audience opinion, something Winsor McCay explored decades earlier.
As Gerard C. Raiti, following Paul Laswell, has pointed out, “propaganda requires a
medium that exaggerates and hyperbolizes actions,” thus animation’s “ability to mold
reality in unreal ways” lent it to this purpose.
44

Furthermore, the association of cartoons with humor and family entertainment
leads audiences to be more receptive to the underlying messages of an animated
propaganda short.
45
In Chicken Little (1943) the nefarious Foxey Loxey persuades
Chicken Little and the other inhabitants of the poultry coop that the sky is falling on their
head and they will only be safe if they hide in his cave. Once lured into his trap, the
naïve birds are devoured by Foxey. The film is a lesson in not listening to rumors and
teaches us that war is as much a psychological as physical battle. The message in the
Oscar-winning Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943) is more overt as Donald dreams he is living an
austere and totalitarian Nazi-ruled nightmare where he gnaws on stale scraps of bread for
53
breakfast and toils endlessly on a production line making bombs and bullets to secure
Hitler’s world domination. The nightmare ends when Donald wakes in stars and stripes
pajamas and realizes the statue casting a shadow of a saluting figure on his wall is
actually a miniature of the Statue of Liberty. Donald hugs the statue in desperate relief,
gasping “Oh boy! Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America.” The anti-
Nazi message of the film is underlined by its catchy theme song in which an oom-pah
band plays along to the lyrics of “we HEIL! HEIL! right in the Fuehrer’s Face!” The
propaganda shorts released by Disney and the other studios during the Second World
War are not as overtly non-fictional as the education and training films discussed in this
section. However, while they may present fictional worlds and narratives, these films
have embedded in them opinions and messages about the world and historical, actual
events. With their prolific Wartime output, Disney and the other Hollywood producers of
these animated shorts realized animation’s potential as a tool for both persuasion and
education.

Animated Education
The educational films produced by Disney during World War Two suggested a
long-term potential for the pedagogic use of animation. Disney established a unit
devoted to this task when the Educational and Industrial Film Division was set up in
1944. However, while the unit output eleven productions in its first two years of
operation it then made only one film between 1947 and 1961. As Shale has noted, it was
issues of financing that constrained Disney’s educational ambitions.
46
During the War,
54
these types of shorts had been funded through military and government contracts, but
“World War II … in the case of educational films, had offered Disney an experience he
could not duplicate” as, after the armistice, funding for educational and instructional
shorts was harder to come by.
47

Disney’s interest in education-through-animation was established, however, far
earlier than the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into the Second World War.
Before Walt moved to Hollywood and when he was still working in the Mid-West he was
commissioned by Dr. Thomas B. McCrum of the Deener Dental Institute in Kansas City,
Missouri, to make Tommy Tucker’s Tooth (1922).
48
This black and white, silent
“amusing paean for dental hygiene,” which Walt followed up four years later with Clara
Cleans Her Teeth (1926), combined live-action and animation in a way that would later
become familiar in Disney’s wartime educational and training shorts.
49
With these early
pedagogic endeavors, Walt was following in the footsteps of many of the pioneers of
animation and cinema. As early as 1910 Thomas Edison made instructional films that
included animated sequences

and, according to Richard Fleischer, Randolph Bray made
partially animated educational films for the US Government prior to 1916.
50

Even earlier than this, in the UK, amateur filmmaker Percy Smith became
interested in the use of animation and scientific cinematography while working at the
Board of Education at the turn of the Twentieth Century.
51
Smith began working part-
time for Charles Urban, a producer of scientific films, in 1908 and although he mostly
focused on cinematography and the use of devices such as time-lapse photography and
microcinematography, he also made animated scientific films early in his career. For
55
example, the year after he started working for Charles Urban he made To Demonstrate
How Spiders Fly (1909).
52
This short film uses stop-motion animation to bring a model
spider to life and was intended by Smith to cure arachnophobes. The film was one of
many zoological films made by Smith to unveil the workings of the plant and animal
world to the general public.
53
For Smith, animation became another option for revealing
aspects of the natural world that were previously unseen by the human eye. As such,
animation was another technique to access the “new way of seeing” offered by the
technologies developed from the eighteenth century that expanded our visual realm.
54

The potential to use animation to reveal the workings of things not visible to the human
eye was also explored by Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin in his 1926 film The
Mechanics of the Human Brain. Pudovkin’s film about Pavlov’s examination of brain
function and reflexes uses animated diagrams to clarify different aspects of the research,
such as which parts of the brain govern physical activities such as speech, vision and
movement.
55
As would Disney during the Second World War, Pudovkin was exploiting
the fact that visualized information is easier to understand and retain than that which is
simply spoken or written. Animation becomes a prescient tool to visualize things that are
unseeable by the naked eye and unfilmable with a camera.
In 1921 Max Fleischer, who had made animated films for the US government
during the First World War under the aegis of the Bray Studios, established his own
studio with his brother Dave. Shortly after they set up Out of the Inkwell, Inc., the
Fleischer brothers were prompted to expand their filmmaking endeavors beyond the
entertaining single-reelers they had been producing up to that date. Inspiration came in
56
the form of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which had been proved by a solar eclipse in
1919 and had captured the public’s imagination even if, supposedly, only seven people in
the world understood the science behind it.
56
This wide interest coupled with a general
lack of understanding of the physics of Einstein’s theory motivated the Fleischers to
make their first feature-length film. For Max in particular “with his scientific mind and
background, the idea of making a serious film that would give the average person some
idea of what it was all about was irresistible.”
57
The filmmakers enlisted the help of
several of Einstein’s assistants as well as Professor Garrett P. Serviss, a well-regarded
science writer at the New York American.
58
This scientific expertise complemented Max
Fleischer’s previous experience gained during the War of communicating information
through animation to an audience lacking any specialist knowledge.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1923) uses both live action and animation and is
interspersed with explanatory title cards. The animation itself is simple and used in a
similar way to diagrams in school textbooks to illustrate abstract and scientific concepts
that might otherwise be difficult to understand. The relativity of direction, for example,
is explained in a series of animations using the planet Earth in motion as viewed from
Space. Thus, we are shown how a ball thrown up from a tower protruding from the
surface of the earth falls, not straight up and down as one might expect, but in an arc
when viewed from space. The film was critically well received and Einstein himself was
so impressed with the Fleischers’ interpretation of his theory that he wrote “to the
distributor that he thought the picture was an excellent attempt to illustrate an abstract
subject.”
59
Spurred on by their success the Fleischers subsequently made a film about
57
Darwin’s theory of evolution. Once again, their intention was to explain the science
behind a theory that had gained parlance amongst the general public and they were
motivated, in particular, by the trial of Tennessee teacher John Scopes for teaching the
theory to his students.
60
They made Evolution (1923) with advice from the Museum of
Natural History in New York and the film, which was another surprise hit for the
Fleischer studio, used a similar combination of animation, live action and explanatory
intertitles.
The Fleischers were professional animators who turned their hands, briefly, to
non-fictional subjects and made films aimed at educating the public on issues in
contemporary science. The use of animation for education was, however, also picked up
on by many educators in Britain during the 1930s. These teachers-turned-amateur
filmmakers produced educational films for use in schools and by other groups on subjects
ranging from science to history and mathematics to nutrition.
61
Hence, while the
capacity of animation to explain abstract scientific concepts, as previously exploited by
Percy Smith and the Fleischers, was appreciated, so too was its ability to illustrate and
clarify a variety of topics. In many of the films the familiar method of animated maps
was used. Bundy and Goodliffe’s Mediaeval England (1936) used animated maps to
demonstrate the changes over the centuries to a village in Nottinghamshire.
The introduction of animated symbols to the more usual animated maps in a film
produced by Mary Field in 1936 apparently caused quite “a stir.”
62
The Expansion of
Germany (1936) used a method developed by Dr. Otto Neurath of Vienna to illustrate
“social and economic statistics with symbolic pictorial diagrams,” which had been
58
demonstrated by Dr. Neurath at a talk organized by the British Film Institute in
November 1933.
63
The new method adopted by Field and her director Andrew Miller
Jones allowed for the succinct and clear dissemination of statistical information and
complemented the already seen techniques of animating maps. This method was readily
taken up by other amateur filmmakers in their pedagogic films, for example by the
eminent scientist-turned-economist Professor Michael Polanyi in his diagrammatic film
explaining the monetary system, An Outline of the Working of Money (1938). In fact, the
animation of symbolic diagrams became a particularly useful tool in films endeavoring to
teach and clarify numerical-based knowledge such as mathematics, statistics and
economics. During this period of educational filmmaking the use of animation to clarify
and explain abstract knowledge and concepts was established. The dissemination of
abstract information through pictures, an approach that had long been recognized in
conventional teaching formats such as lectures and books, was adopted into educational
films through the use of animation.

Animating the Abstract: Sponsored Explorations in Form and Technique
Producer Robert Fairthorne, who worked with the filmmaker Brian Salt to make
scientific and mathematical films in the 1930s, claimed the animated diagrams in these
films, in “expressing abstract relations in terms of shape and motion, were the true
abstract films.”
64
With this comment, Fairthorne was comparing his and Salt’s
educational films to “the animated films of concrete shapes which were commonly called
abstract.”
65
Here Fairthorne is most likely referring to the abstract films made by Len
59
Lye under the aegis of the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit in the U.K. during the
1930s. In particular, during his time working under John Grierson at the GPO, Lye made
A Colour Box (1935), Rainbow Dance (1936) and Trade Tattoo (1937), three abstract
animations in which he painted and stenciled directly onto the filmstrip. Lye’s animated
films and the direct animations later made in a similar style by Norman McLaren in
Canada are not motivated by the pedagogic objectives of the animated films discussed in
previous sections. However, these films are inexorably bound up with the documentary
intention, both in the context of their production and, in many instances, the nominal
reasons behind their creation.
At first glance Lye and the GPO Film Unit seem an unlikely fit. In his native
New Zealand Lye developed an interest in primitive art and developed his own
conception of Freud’s theories of primitive modes of thought that he called the ‘old
brain.’ Lye saw movement in the detail of the static and solid indigenous works of art
that inspired him and became interested with the idea of “composing motion.”
66
The
GPO Film Unit was established in 1933 under the leadership of John Grierson, the
inspirational leader of what later became known as the British documentary film
movement.
67
The movement coalesced around an ethos of social education and was
financially supported by government organizations such as the Gas Board, the Coal
Board and the Post Office. As a result the documentaries produced by the movement
often had a pedagogic tone and were steeped in social realism.
68

The films of the documentary movement tended to be serious and educational, a
far cry from Len Lye’s personal desire to express the “old brain” and to compose
60
movement. However, Grierson also had a history of employing young men in whom he
saw artistic talent and originality such as Humphrey Jennings and, Grierson’s own second
in command, Alberto Cavalcanti, who had made silent avant-garde films in France in the
1920s.
69
Indeed, when Lye approached Grierson in 1935 the GPO Film Unit head saw
Lye’s vision as an opportunity to “liven up the Unit’s packages of black-and-white
documentaries.”
70
As Elizabeth Sussex has pointed out, the years between 1934 and
1936 can be considered the pinnacle of creativity within the documentary movement.
Both Grierson and Cavalcanti, she observes, were “great inspirers, yet what each had to
offer was completely different.” She suggests this as a reason for the “atmosphere in
which even potentially incompatible personalities could pull together to possibly greater
effect than if they had depended on their individual talents.”
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Lye convinced Grierson of his potential by showing him an example of his
“direct” filmmaking. The idea for direct film – drawing and scratching directly onto the
emulsion of the film stock – was inspired to a great extent by Lye’s financial situation.
His 1929 film Tusalava had been well received by the experimental filmmaking
community in London.
72
However, it then took many years for Lye to find further
funding. His vision failed to attract commercial sponsors as they felt his work did not
lend itself to their goals of promotion and marketing, and there was no further funding
available from the Film Society. At this point, around 1934, Lye realized that he could
bypass the need for a camera – the most cost-prohibitive part of the filming process – by
drawing directly onto the film.
61
Lye’s first direct film was made in collaboration with Jack Ellitt, who played an
important creative role in the synchronization of sound and image in all of Lye’s GPO
films. Full Fathom Five (1935) featured the actor John Gielgud reciting lines from
Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Ellitt measured out the phrases of the recitation on the film
onto which Lye directly drew his images.
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Upon seeing this example of Len Lye’s
potential John Grierson agreed to commission a film for the GPO Film Unit. Grierson
got around the problem of using government funds to sponsor an artistic experiment by
placing a short Post Office promotional message on the end of the film, which Lye
incorporated into the style of the film’s animation. A Colour Box was commissioned in
June of 1935 and, while it took Lye only about five days to paint the film stock, the
complete film took at least two months to produce. Lye’s desire was to both translate the
music on the soundtrack visually as well as for the visual aspect of the film to work in
counterpoint to the audio track.
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The film is a little over three minutes long and starts with abstract images of dots
and circles that shake and shimmy across the screen, accompanied by upbeat drumming.
Once the saxophone kicks in, the image changes to vertical lines that jump and wiggle,
bisecting the colored background. Later, when other instruments such as the piano join
the score, the image combines the previously seen lines and dots and introduces further
shapes such as triangles that rotate and spin, growing large and smaller. All the time, the
color of the background and detail is changing, from greens to reds to yellows and back.
In the last minute of the film, the letters ‘G.’, ‘P.’ and ‘O.’ appear individually on the
screen, wavering around in time to the music. The message ‘CHEAPER’ ‘PARCEL’
62
‘POST’ is followed by the specific postage rates such as ‘4lbs. 7d’ (telling the audience
that it cost seven pence to send a package weighing four pounds).
The inclusion of the sponsor’s message, while perhaps feeling thematically out of
place with the tone of A Colour Box, is at least aesthetically incorporated into the film.
The words and numbers of the message are treated much like the previously seen abstract
shapes and lines and are synchronized with the music in a similar way. In Lye’s next
film for the GPO Unit, Rainbow Dance, the advertising message seems more at odds with
the formal experimentation. Rainbow Dance was made in the following year and was in
part inspired by Lye’s interest in the three-color separation techniques that had recently
been developed. The Gasparcolor process was both awkwardly fiddly and garnered
unpredictable results. However, when it did work it produced vibrant colors and it was
this that drove Lye to experiment with the process.
Lye learned that he could put any black and white footage through the
Gasparcolor process and that it would be converted to color. In order to have the greatest
control over the final color result, the entire profilmic world of Rainbow Dance – all of
the sets and costumes – was black and white. Once Lye had shot footage of the
silhouetted dancer, played by Rupert Doone, it was printed with complex stencil patterns
and put through the Gasparcolor process. The resulting film is an uplifting, joyous piece
that couples live-action with hand-drawn and stenciled animation. As well as developing
his color experimentation, Lye is furthering his foundational artistic motivation of
composing movement. Lye believed that the movement in both Rainbow Dance and A
Colour Box was “colour movement,” and that this moved in counterpoint to the object
63
carrying the color.
75
Furthermore, Lye claimed that color was used in an objective way in
A Colour Box, but a subjective way in Rainbow Dance. This is because Lye had more
control over the color process in the later film due to his choice of entirely creating the
color during the developing process.
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Rainbow Dance begins with the silhouetted figure wearing a mackintosh and
holding up an umbrella as ‘rain’ falls in the foreground. The rain stops as the music
becomes upbeat when the saxophone joins the soundtrack. A rainbow forms in the
background, the umbrella comes down and the man begins to ‘strum’ it to the
accompaniment of a catchy guitar melody. The mackintosh-wearing, umbrella-
strumming figure transforms into a guitar player wearing hiking gear. Soon he is walking
in an exaggerated fashion against a backdrop of hills. When he leaps through the air he
leaves an animated trail of colored silhouettes behind him. A train travels across a
background of maps and animated fish jump in and out of live-action footage of crashing
waves. Our man then becomes a tennis player, posing around his racquet with a court
behind him that stretches back to the point of infinity. ‘Tennis balls’, or rather, circular
patterns created using the stenciling process, fly across the screen. These eventually turn
into coins that gather on the right side of the frame against a backdrop that says ‘SCORE
SHEET’. The tennis player lies down on the court, which Lye then transforms into a bed
using matte effects. A coin-dotted rainbow ends at the man’s pillow. The film ends with
the image of a Post Office savings book and the words “the Post Office savings bank puts
a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for you - no deposit too small for the Post Office
savings bank,” spoken by a stilted, yet proper, voice.
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The message in this film feels more awkward than in A Colour Box as there is
little thematic or aesthetic connection between the sponsor’s slogan and the rest of the
film. However, where the film fails as a piece of advertising it succeeds in achieving
Lye’s artistic goal, which was to “replace the clichés of realistic representation with what
he called ‘moving hieroglyphics.’”
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Furthermore, the combination of live-action and
figurative and abstract animation was truly original. This may explain why this film
received a mixed response when it was screened to the public in 1938. The juxtaposition
of advertising message and experimental filmmaking was perhaps too extreme for the
film’s contemporary audience.
Lye furthered his experimentation with the color separation process in his next
GPO film, Trade Tattoo. For this film, Lye used the new process developed by
Technicolor, which had recently opened a lab in Britain. Using out-take footage of GPO
documentary films, Lye wanted to convey ‘“a romanticism about the work of the
everyday, in all walk/ sit works of life.”’
78
The found-footage was printed mostly in
negative to create a silhouetted image of the objects on film, much like the dancing figure
in Rainbow Dance. The silhouettes of trains, signalmen and images of industrial life
form the background against which Lye stenciled vibrant and colorful abstract patterns.
The sponsor’s message is delivered this time, as in A Colour Box, through words printed
onto the frame. Phrases such as “markets are found” jump around the screen in rhythm to
the music. Much like the abstract patterns of dots and lines and shapes, the words are
printed on the top of the found documentary footage of working Britain. The key
65
message of the film is that the ‘rhythm of the trades is maintained by the mails’ – that the
economic structure of the country is underpinned by the Post Office.
Trade Tattoo can be seen as an articulation of the contrast between Lye’s artistic
endeavors and the aims of the documentary movement. The film uses as its foundation
the realist, black and white documentary footage shot in the course of creating the
movement’s standard output – films of working Britain that served a social or educational
purpose. On top of this foundation, Lye creates his own artistic vision through the use of
animated, abstract image painted directly onto the film. As such, it could be argued that
this film exemplifies how out of place Lye and his films were at the GPO Film Unit and
within the documentary movement as a whole. As Roger Horrocks has observed, Lye
stood out from the other young, university-educated filmmakers that made up the
movement as “his concerns were less political and his projects were mostly shaped by his
own hand.”
79
Furthermore, Lye never got too involved with any artistic group or
movement and while “he was pleased to be associated with the GPO Film Unit, [he]
seldom socialized with other film-makers.”
80

However, Lye’s unique brand of modern art and his romanticizing of the
everyday were in fact in keeping with the artistic and social ethos of the documentary
movement. In Rainbow Dance, but more especially in Trade Tattoo there is an equation
between Lye’s experimental, modern filmmaking techniques and the display of British
modernity. The patterns printed over the found-documentary footage in Trade Tattoo
both juxtapose with the black and white material while at the same time suggesting an
affinity between these two elements of the film. This film, like the two others Lye made
66
for the GPO, is infused with motion and energy and this kinetic vibrancy transfers onto
the nominal subject of the films – the Post Office and modern Britain. In fact, the films
themselves brought the sponsor a certain prestige from being associated with forward-
thinking contemporary art-making practices.
81
Furthermore, Lye’s abstract
representations in Rainbow Dance and Trade Tattoo romanticize everyday life. An
umbrella turns into a guitar at the end of a rainstorm and an industrial furnace morphs
through bright colors as it moves across the frame. This romanticizing of the everyday is
a common trope in the films of the documentary movement. In these films, working
class figures and industrial life are glorified and the humdrum becomes magnificent.
If one considers the figures that made up the documentary movement then Len
Lye’s work seems less of an anomaly. The “Grierson gang” was made up of “painters,
poets and misfits.”
82
Because Lye’s films do not conform to the historical idea of what
the documentary movement was supposed to be, they “can be cited as evidence of its, and
John Grierson’s, greater breadth than the stereotype normally allows.”
83
Furthermore,
Lye’s films are an example of an early marriage between the documentary and animation
impulses, albeit one that differs from the hybridization exemplified by Disney and the
other animators who made pedagogic films. Whereas the educational films discussed
above capitalized on animation’s ability to clarify and illustrate, Lye’s films show a
different kind of union between these two media forms. Rather than using animation to
further a documentary’s epistemological impact, Lye used the framework of documentary
and state-sponsored filmmaking to experiment with the animated form. Winsor McCay’s
Sinking of the Lusitania and animated educational films used animation to compensate
67
for a lack in and of live action footage. For McCay, no original footage of the event
existed and for the educators, live action was not capable of conveying information and
knowledge in as effective and efficient way as animation. Lye, on the other hand,
explored the expressive and lyrical aspects of animation within a documentary production
context.
The institutional cross-pollination of animation and documentary was continued
by Norman McLaren and the National Film Board of Canada. McLaren had, like Len
Lye, worked at the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson, where he made four films.
Having previously established his fluency in both documentary and animation with Hell
Unlimited (1936), which he made with Helen Biggar at the Glasgow School of Art,
McLaren made both types of film at the GPO. His animated films, Mony a Pickle (1938)
and Love on the Wing (1938), were in a similar vein to Lye’s films with the use of
experimental animation to promote the services of the Post Office.
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When Grierson
moved to Canada in 1939 to set up the Film Board he quickly appointed McLaren, who
joined him in 1941, as the head of the animation department. During the Second World
War, McLaren made many advertising and promotional films that used animation to
encourage people, for example, to send their Holiday mail in a timely fashion (Mail Early
for Christmas [1941]), to purchase war savings certificates (5 for 4 [1942]) and to avoid
war gossip (Keep Your Mouth Shut [1944]).
It is feasible that the Film Board’s prolific output of wartime animation was
prompted by how impressed Grierson had been at the screening of Disney’s Four
Methods of Flush Riveting in 1941. After the NFBC’s initial commission of educational
68
animated films from Disney it seems they took the production of these types of films in
house. However, much like Len Lye, McLaren used the remit of promotional and
educational films as a forum for experimentation and his films show a tendency to push
the boundaries of the animated form. Hen Hop (1942), for example, bears as little
relation to its ostensible subject matter (saving via war certificates) as Len Lye’s
Rainbow Dance does to investing in a Post Office savings account. McLaren used the
film to explore his own technique of working directly on the filmstrip and the production
involved a painstaking process of transferring the lively soundtrack onto the film on
which McLaren then hand drew his images using pen and ink. The color was added
during the printing stage using a simple two-color process.
85
The resulting piece is a
celebration of movement in which a hen hops and dances around the screen. While the
film is less abstract than Lye’s GPO work it still only loosely connects to the message of
the film through the few seconds when the word ‘save’ jitters around on the screen
towards the end of the film.
86

In 1944 John Grierson organized the Film Board into fourteen separate production
units along lines of the subject or style of films being made, formalizing a system that
had occurred spontaneously during the War.
87
By 1950 this system had become unwieldy
and the Board was reorganized into four units, each responsible for several different types
of film and encompassing a wider range of topics. The combination of sponsored,
scientific, cultural and animated films under Unit B prompted a new era of
experimentation and creativity in both animation and documentary after a long period
when the latter in particular had been stifled artistically. David Jones attributes the Film
69
Board’s uninspiring documentary output in the 1940s to John Grierson’s aversion to
artiness in documentary. By the time Grierson took on the mantle of film commissioner
in 1939 he had reverted from his early tenet of documentary as the “creative treatment of
actuality.” Instead, he was more concerned with high levels of productivity, “banging
them out and no misses,” and “no longer cared so much for either ‘creativity’ or
‘actuality.’”
88
By the 1950s, professionalism prevailed at the Film Board and greater
value was placed on turning out films on time and on budget than on aesthetics.
Unit B bucked the ingrained patterns of production at the NFBC by sidestepping
bureaucracy and prioritizing the films themselves. The talent of the personnel in the Unit
eventually became recognized to the extent that the management “would allow them,
occasionally, to break the rules beforehand, i.e., with permission, instead of having to
quietly exceed the budget or projected completion date and then justify the transgression
with an outstanding film.”
89
As well as displaying a willingness to transgress
bureaucratic lines, Unit B also showed little concern for the traditional boundaries
between different styles of filmmaking such as documentary and animation. The subject
matter of the film determined the aesthetic approach and this led to the creativity and
focus on aesthetics for which the Unit became known.
Thus, members of the unit tended to work on both documentaries and animated
films, with the exception of McLaren who, after the war, worked exclusively on
experimental animated films. Despite working mostly alone McLaren still influenced the
output of Unit B in both direct and indirect ways. He trained several of the new recruits
including Colin Low, Robert Verrall and Wolf Koenig, in his methods of abstract and
70
experimental animation.
90
In a less direct way, McLaren, who had “enjoyed a special
status at the Film Board from the day Grierson hired him,” came to represent a certain
aesthetic standard to which others began to aspire.
91
Low, Verrall and Koenig, along with
other members of Unit B, were subsequently inspired to explore beyond the typical
aesthetic limitations of Film Board documentaries to make the first film “to make a
significant inroad against postwar Film Board pedantry.”
92
The Romance of
Transportation in Canada (1952) was made using cel animation techniques, and as such
required a different approach to production than the auteur-style of working demonstrated
by McLaren. This working method was in part encouraged by Low et al’s interest in
trying out the more collaborative style of animation production and also by the rumblings
from certain government departments that had requested a more conventional and
mainstream style of animation than McLaren was producing.
93
As a result the film,
which was intended for classroom use, has more in common, stylistically, with the
Hollywood studio cartoons of the time than it does with experimental pieces being made
by McLaren.
94

The Romance of Transportation in Canada is a tongue-in-cheek history of
different transportation methods and how they overcame or were challenged by the
particular problems posed by the country’s vast and often impassable terrain. The bright,
colorful animation is accompanied by a jaunty, jazzy musical score and voiceover by Guy
Glover, another Unit B member. In style, the animation resembles the look being
pioneered at new animation studio, United Productions of America, which will be
discussed below, with flattened, non-realistic character design and the use of oblong and
71
angular shapes. In tone, however, the film adopts many of the gags familiar from
mainstream Hollywood animation and, in particular, the slapstick violence of Warner
Bros.’ cartoons. Characters plummet to the ground as their sleds run off the edge of a
cliff or their airplane runs out of fuel and on several occasions we witness the transition
to a more advanced mode of transport as it, quite literally, collides with the pilot of an
early incarnation. The lighthearted tone is emphasized by the amusing finish to the film
in which space-age predictions are made to the future of transportation in Canada. As
Jones notes, the film broke the mold of serious documentaries at the Film Board and
showed that education did not have to be dour or boring.
95
It also heralded the beginning
of the tradition of critical recognition and awards for the Film Board with its nomination
for the Oscar for best animated short in 1953.
This open-minded approach to documentary making and willingness to
experiment with the form can be seen again in the animated documentary the Unit
produced in the late-1950s. Unit B members were willing to use whatever medium or
approach that best served the subject matter, so when Colin Low and Roman Kroitor
suggested an educational film about astronomy, the Unit’s filmmakers were not put off
by the technical experimentation that would be required to create the look of the film.
Universe (1960) took four years to make, in part due to the on-off production schedule
enforced by a restrictive financial arrangement where the film’s budget of $60,000 was
split over three financial years with the film having to be shelved for the remainder of the
year once that annual allotment of funds had been spent.
96
The large budget, which was
much higher than for most single films made at the Film Board during the 1950s, and the
72
fact that it was allowed to balloon to over $100,000, was an indication of the faith the
Board had in the Unit’s work.
97
The stop-and-start production schedule ultimately
benefited the film as it allowed the team time to overcome the various creative challenges
presented by the film, which would offer a close-up view of the solar system. Universe
combines live action and 3D object animation to convey a sense of wonder at the
universe, a tone that is accentuated by the atmospheric musical score and Douglas Rain’s
voiceover.
98
Decades before computer generated animation would make images of outer
space commonplace, Universe used pioneer animation methods involving miniature
models to take us on a journey around our solar system. The film was very successful, its
popularity undoubtedly bolstered by the launch of the Sputnik program as the film was
being completed, and became one of the most widely distributed educational films made.
It was even adopted by NASA who ordered 300 copies of the film for both internal
training and public information.
99

The work of Len Lye’s at the GPO and Norman McLaren and the other
filmmakers in Unit B at the National Film Board of Canada demonstrates a flexibility
towards the boundary between documentary and animation at these two institutions.
Furthermore, they are both institutions that have had a lasting impact on the documentary
in and beyond their national contexts. The films examined in this section show that
animation and documentary frequently have similar motivations and goals and that these
two media forms are far from antithetical. Guy Glover, who worked at Unit B, has
commented on the relevance of animation to documentary, particularly with reference to
the skills learned by the documentary makers at Unit B in working on animated films.
73
Animation, Glover suggests, helps a filmmaker appreciate pacing, rhythm and
composition. Furthermore, the documentary maker versed in animation production “is
haunted by thoughts of artifice knowing better than most, however, that in documentary
he is dealing with the most treacherous artifice of all – the artifice which maintains that to
‘bring ‘em back alive’ is gospel truth.”
100
Not only can animation help the documentarian
clearly express information and amusingly retell history, but animation also has the
ability to put into perspective the challenge of representing the real.

Eastern Europe and Symbolic Animation
While Lye and McLaren’s explorations of animation were funded and sanctioned
by the state, the political situation in Eastern Europe after the Second World War led
animators to exploit animation’s potential for symbolic expression in order to engage
with the reality of the authoritarian rule under which they lived and worked. The
animators whose work will be examined in this section were not engaging directly with
the documentary intention in the way McCay, Percy Smith or even McLaren and Lye did.
They were neither seeking to clarify, illustrate or teach, nor were they working within an
institutional context of documentary production to produce ostensible promotional films.
They did, however, make allegorical animations that work on multiple levels. These
animations present a surface meaning of a fictional story while also alluding to the
political and social situation of the Soviet-ruled countries in which they were made
through the symbolism of both the animation itself and the films’ narratives. The
animation output from the Soviet nations from the 1940s is both vast and varied and
74
impossible to cover comprehensively here. As such, this section will briefly examine
examples from key animators in Yugoslavia, Russia and Czechoslovakia.
Animation in post-World War Two Eastern Europe became an outlet for
subtextual expressions of political opinion and social discontent for several reasons.
Film, as all other artistic activity, was severely censored in post-War Soviet Union and its
satellite states. Animation, however, was initially considered merely children’s
entertainment and, as such, less of a potential threat to the dominant ideology.
Furthermore, animators in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, for example, tended to
base their films on traditional folk stories and fairy tales, which were considered
acceptable and unthreatening fodder for the masses. The tendency for animation to
feature non-human characters also dissociated it from arts that were suspected of
commenting on and critiquing contemporary life.
101
Similarly, the production process of
animation helped it avoid the censors’ attention. As Mira and Antonin Liehm point out,
animation scripts were hard for the layperson to understand and, as a result, animated
films avoided pre-production censorship.
102
Moreover, the nationalization of cinema in
the Soviet nations enabled artistic freedom as animators were not bound by commercial
constraints or concerns about making a profit.
103
Once an animated film had been
produced it often still managed to avoid censorship as the
authorities were presented with the finished work, which frequently
received disapprobation … but which were defended from the
consequences of disapproval both by their artistic quality and by the
immediate international response that they evoked, both of which were
more than rare at that time.
104

Thus, the combination of artistic restrictions with freedom from financial considerations
75
spurred the creativity of the Soviet and Eastern European animators during this period.
Many of their films are rich with symbolism, surrealism and convoluted narratives to
circumvent the censors. Similarly, the political and practical contexts in which they
produced their work led animators to experiment with new techniques and the films from
this region demonstrate a wide variety of styles.
Both Jiri Trnka (Czechoslovakia) and Yuri Norstein (Soviet Union) made films
that engaged with the suppression of artistic expression under totalitarian regimes. The
Hand (Trnka, 1965) and Tale of Tales (Norstein, 1979) were made at the beginning and
end, respectively, of Brezhnev’s term as leader of the Soviet Union. As Ronald
Holloway has pointed out, this era signaled “a shift from the ‘cultural thaw’ of the
previous decade to a reinforcement of hard line policy.”
105
Thus, the cultural attitude that
had loosened during Khrushchev’s leadership was once again tightened in a period that
saw a return to restrictions on the arts. Brezhnev’s policy, however, of stifling voices
through refusing an outlet to artists he did not like only succeeded in fueling creativity as
artists were forced to “go inside” themselves to “find the freedom” they needed.
106
In
The Hand, Trnka criticizes totalitarianism and the idolatry of Communism through the
narrative of an artist who is forced to make a replica of a giant hand that invades his
studio. Using stop-motion puppet animation, Trnka demonstrates the futility of the
artist’s resistance to the hand’s demands, and the quashing of his creative expression is
symbolized through the repeated destruction of a treasured possession, a potted plant that
he lovingly cares for. The hand demands, coaxes, flirts and physically threatens the artist
until, eventually, as a puppet whose wires are controlled by the hand itself, he produces
76
the required statue. Trnka avoided immediate censorship by fashioning the hand in a
fascist salute, and thus claimed that the film was anti-fascist and hence pro-Communist.
However, the true meaning of the film is clear as a damning criticism of the suppression
of creative individuality within a regime that required the idolization of its leaders in
order to achieve artistic success.
The style of animation used by Trnka in The Hand is founded in the tradition of
puppet theater in Czechoslovakia that was established in the seventeenth century. At that
time, when the area that later became Czechoslovakia was part of the Habsburg Empire,
the popularity of puppet theater “had as much to do with politics as art” as this form of
entertainment was, particularly in Bavaria, also a means of protest against the imperial
rule.
107
Animator Jan Svankmajer studied puppetry as a student and bought these skills
and interests to his first forays into filmmaking in the mid-1960s. Svankmajer later
became a member of the Surrealist Group in 1970 and it is within this artistic context that
his work is most often discussed.
108
Surrealism had, in the 1950s Soviet Bloc, become,
according to Svankmajer, “the only authentic alternative to the official cultural
wasteland.”
109
Thus, even though the surrealists’ work was often less obviously anti-
communist they were still subject to censorship. Svankmajer himself was “silenced” in
1972 for making Lenoardo’s Diary, a film that obliquely criticized the bleakness and
somberness of life in Czechoslovakia during the period of normalization after the 1968
Prague Spring.
110

While Trnka directly criticized the State in The Hand, Svankmajer’s films often
tend to make broader political criticisms of both communism and capitalism, yet they are
77
still engaging in a discourse concerning the context of their production. Svankmajer has
labeled his films “fantastic documentary,” giving an indication of a connection between
his work and reality.
111
This connection, however, is inflected through symbolism,
surrealism and abstraction. In Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) and The Death of
Stalinism in Bohemia (1990) Svankmajer’s manipulation of physical objects conveys
symbolic, political meaning. Dimensions of Dialogue is divided into three parts that
together work to criticize political, physical and emotional consumption and the
subsuming of the self to a higher order. In the first section, Exhaustive Discussion,
bricolage heads comprised of objects such as kitchen implements and foodstuffs consume
one another in turn, spitting out a newly formed, equally fragmented head. A book
crushes a dinner plate, a colander dices up a bread roll, and materials are finely chopped
and pulped until smooth, virtually identical clay heads are formed in a production line of
consuming-spitting heads. The perils of non-cooperation are demonstrated in the third
section, Factual Conversation. Here two clay heads face each other and work together
by expelling complimentary objects from their mouths. Thus when a pencil protrudes
from one head, a sharpener comes out of the other. When one head expels a toothbrush,
the other emits a tube of toothpaste, which is squeezed onto the waiting brush. Things
soon go wrong, however, and the system fails when the heads continue to follow
proscribed acts despite the mismatching of their presented objects. A shoe gets covered
with butter and a toothbrush is sharpened with a pencil sharpener. The process becomes
increasingly destructive until both heads are reduced to unrecognizable piles of clay. As
Peter Hames points out, the “anti-Stalinist implications of Dimensions of Dialogue …
78
were readily apparent” and this film was shown to the ideology committee of the Central
Committee of the Czech Communist Party as an example of the sorts of things that
should be avoided in film and animation.
112

The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia uses stop-motion animation, live action and
archival material to portray the history of Czechoslovakia from the Stalinist era to the
splitting of the country into two nations after the 1989 fall of Communism. A bust of
Stalin ‘gives birth,’ via cesarean section, to a blood-covered bust of Klement Gottwald,
the Czech communist leader who was a loyal follower of Stalin’s policies, and this
opening to the film symbolizes Czechoslovakia’s acceptance of Communist rule. This is
emphasized with the bust gives a rousing speech that is intercut with archival footage of
cheering crowds. Later, identical clay ‘workers’ are produced on a factory production
line and are immediately sacrificed to produce more clay workers. While this sequence is
more generally symbolic of the lack of individualism allowed under the Soviet regime,
this film is the most historically specific and directly political of Svankmajer’s work and
he refers to it as “propaganda.”
113
In these two films, as in all of Svankmajer’s
animation, the materiality of the objects he animates plays an integral part in the
allegorical meaning. Paul Wells has noted that three-dimensional object animation
creates a “certain meta-reality which has the same physical property as the real world.”
114

As such, Svankmajer’s films retain a tangible link with the world. The surreal
manipulation of the everyday and familiar becomes, in Svankmajer’s hands, a powerful
tool for commenting on the historical world of lived experience.

79
Yuri Norstin’s Tale of Tales is a complex, fantastical fusing of the
autobiographical and the political. Using intricate cut-out animation techniques, Norstein
recalls his childhood during the Second World War when his family was sent from
Moscow to the Russian countryside. Here, while the adult males fought and died in the
war, the evacuees traded jewelry for food and the acquisition of a potato forms an integral
part of the film. The dreamlike, hazy look of the film, with its sepia color palate, was
achieved using celluloid rather than the traditional card for the cut-out figures.
Characters were drawn directly onto the film, which was then cut out to shape and
layered onto textured backgrounds.
115
Rather than re-drawing each image to create the
illusion of movement, the limbs and appendages of the cut-out figures are moved
between each shot. There are also several moments when Tale of Tales incorporates live-
action material, in a variety of methods. The urban scenes are based on Norstein’s
memories of the northern suburb of Moscow in which he grew up, but his recollection
was aided by still photographs he took of the area during pre-production. Less obliquely,
the effect of burning and fire that occurs several times during the film was
achieved by hanging a sheet of kerosene-soaked paper on the coat hooks
along the corridor in [Norstein’s] studio, then setting it alight and filming
it. When incorporating this into the animation a projector and screen were
set up next to the animation stand and a semi-transparent mirror was used
to deflect the image of the fire on to the drawn pile of furniture.
116

The film’s sepia color palate betrays Norstein’s nostalgia for his childhood and the
mournful tone laments the loss of Russia’s menfolk during the war. William Moritz has
described the subtle allegory of the film as urging “artists to accept the burden of keeping
better times alive through art.”
117
Tale of Tales also engages with the censorship under
80
which Norstein worked, albeit more indirectly than The Hand. In Norstein’s film, we see
a poet who cannot write, whose sheet of manuscript is stolen by a little wolf that
absconds with it into the forest where it morphs into a baby. The film’s convoluted
narrative gives no sense of coherent story, instead offering us tableaux and characters that
dip in and out of a fantasy world that bears an uncanny, if intangible, connection to the
world. The Soviet censors were perplexed by the film and its rejection of the style of
socialist realism that was the accepted mode of filmic representation at the time. Their
instinctive reaction that the film was critical of Soviet culture led to the film being
banned, before the bestowal of several major awards prompted its official release.
118

In Yugoslavia a very different style of animation was coalesced by the Zagreb
School between the mid-1950s and late-1970s. Influenced by the angular, graphic style
of UPA, which is discussed in the next section, Yugoslavian animators were less
embedded in the folkloric narrative and visual tradition that informed Norstein’s work in
the Soviet Union. Instead, they employed a fresh modernist style that had more in
common with contemporary graphic design and magazine illustration, such as Saul
Steinberg’s drawings in The New Yorker. With the adoption of ‘reduced animation,’ the
Zagreb School was also moving away from the artisan techniques associated with many
Eastern European animators including Norstein and the intricate object and puppet
animation in Czechoslovakia. Reducing the number of drawings required for an average
animated cartoon by up to a third, this animation technique breathed “a new life, or soul,
into the abstract drawings” and characters were freed from the constraints of
anthropomorphism.
119

81
In Ersatz (1961) Dusan Vukotic’s Miro-like world bears little resemblance to
reality, yet the film still makes a clear comment about its sociopolitical context. A jovial
beach tourist inflates various abstract shapes into the paraphernalia of a day at the
seaside. A small green triangle becomes an inflatable raft and a rectangle becomes a
fishing rod. The film’s subtextual message about power and control becomes apparent
when our pleasure-seeking protagonist inflates an attractive female companion. He
rejects the first model, letting her air out with a hiss, before creating a second that meets
his preference, but only once he’s added a pump or two of extra air to make her more
buxom. When his lady friend absconds with a more beefy suitor our protagonist
expresses his dissatisfaction by deflating her too. Ultimately, the protagonist loses his
own plug and the air escapes to leave him an indistinguishable mass in a deflated world.
The themes in Ersatz are typical of films from the Zagreb Studios in presenting the
“‘everyman’ character as a victim of loneliness, alienation and oppressive social and
supernatural forces.”
120
Here, our protagonist falls foul of exploiting his god-like control
and, as such, the film is an allegory for discontent at Yugoslavia’s powerlessness as a
satellite state of the Soviet Union. As with all the films discussed in this section on
Eastern European animation this film has a safe surface narrative to appease the censors,
masking a potentially subversive reading that engages with the social and political
realities in which it was made.

United Productions of America
Ronald Holloway has commented that the post-Second World War animation
82
from Eastern Europe “together with the UPA innovations in the United States inspired
the ‘cartoon with a message’ of the 1960s.”
121
The reduced animation style adopted by
the Zagreb animators was inspired by the UPA aesthetic, which marked a stylistic break
with the hyper-realistic Disney approach in which animals and human characters were
made to look and move in as lifelike a way as possible. UPA’s “limited animation”
favored “minimalist, and often expressionistic backgrounds” and used less frames than
traditional, “full” animation.
122
Fewer drawings led to less smooth movement, and
characters often seem to jump from one position to another.
123
The overall effect of
UPA’s techniques was a far more abstract look than previous studio animation. Layouts
were suggestive, rather than fully filled-out, and color was used in an expressive way,
often suggesting mood and emotion. There was also less distinction between characters
and background and a move away from the Disney tendency of characters that “stood out
from the background paintings like actors performing in front of stage sets.”
124
Instead,
characters would often be demarcated from the background by a simple outline of body
shape and features. UPA also broke with the Disney mode of organization, in which
labor was divided between separate departments completing the different stages of
animation production in isolation. Instead, the creative process became more holistic and
hierarchies were broken down. Furthermore, the subject matter of UPA’s films initially
moved away from lighthearted family entertainment towards films that expressed their
left-leaning political opinions.
United Productions of America was formed by several ex-Disney employees who,
disenchanted after the bitter strike at the studio in 1941, capitalized on the high demand
83
for educational and industrial films during the War years. UPA’s founding members,
Zachary Schwartz, David Hilberman and Steve Bosustow had all worked at Disney as
well as on industrial and military films. Seeking to work independently, rather than
solely for the companies who employed them after they left Disney, the trio started
making films in their own time. Indeed, UPA grew out of the wartime animated
educational and training films, in style as well as practice. Norman Klein points out how
the preparation for UPA style came through the “detail-oriented and less gag-centered”
military and government films that required accuracy and precision.
125
The limited style
was also, however, necessitated by the limited cash flow at the studio during its first
years of operation.
126

Initially, Schwartz, Hilberman and Bosustow focused their efforts on non-
fictional animations including commissioned educational and promotional films.
Working under the name Industrial Film and Poster Service they made simple
informational films similar to much of the non-entertainment animation being produced
in Hollywood during the War. Their first major production, Hell-Bent for Election
(1944), was sponsored by the United Auto Workers as a campaign film for Franklin
Roosevelt’s bid for re-election to a fourth term as President. The film uses the metaphor
of two trains (the sleek, modern ‘Win The War Special’ and the old, smoke-belching
‘Defeatist Limited’) racing to get through a junction. Here, in a dream sequence, we can
see the nascent style that would later define UPA. All-American ‘Joe,’ who must stay
alert to let the right train through the junction, is lulled to sleep by a diminutive Dewey
supporter. Joe’s dream world is painted in rich, dark tones in which figures are
84
demarcated by white outlines on an inky blue background and a distortion of perspective
and size adds to the hallucinatory atmosphere. Joe awakes in the nick of time to derail
the Defeatist Limited and the Win The War Special powers on to Washington D.C.
Hell-Bent for Election was, like the earlier films, produced after hours and was completed
with the help of animators moonlighting from their jobs at the major studios and in the
military. The collaborative nature of working and the subject matter to which these
animators were driven to dedicate their spare time led, according to Hilberman, to them
self-identifying as “a studio that would work on political, union type films.”
127
The
recognition of this emphasis on union work, rather than on industrial films, and the strong
links to unionization felt in the wake of the Disney strike, led the group to change their
name to United Productions of America.
The success of Hell-Bent for Election led to another film, also sponsored by the
United Auto Workers, The Brotherhood of Man (1945). Based on the Races of Mankind
pamphlet published by the Public Affairs Committee, the film sought to break down
racial prejudices and promote tolerance and equal opportunities. The main character has
his misconceptions regarding racial difference dispelled and thus his doubts about the
possibility of different races living together in modern America are assuaged. As well as
resounding UPA’s political attitudes, this film also sees a further stylistic shift with its
flattened field and more abstract, expressionistic character and background design. In
both Hell-Bent for Election and The Brotherhood of Man, UPA formalized the ‘cartoon
with a message’ with their animations that, while presenting a surface fictional world,
were commenting on events and scenarios in the real world. As such, UPA developed
85
the educational and informational animation produced in the United States during the
War by firmly established the notion of animation’s applicability to non-fiction subject
matters.
The convergence of animation and non-fiction was further developed by John
Hubley, who was a key figure at UPA before establishing an independent animation
company with his wife Faith in 1953. In 1959 the Hubleys made Moonbird, a fantastical
flight of fancy that matches animated visuals to a soundtrack of their sons playing. They
followed this up with two further films, Windy Day (1967) and Cockaboody (1973),
which similarly pair documentary tape recordings of their children with animated
imaginings of their make believe world. In Windy Day the Hubleys’ garden morphs into
the magical kingdom imagined by their daughters, where Georgia plays ‘Princess Polly’
and Emily takes on the role of ‘Prince Joel.’ What we see is often directly connected to
what we hear the girls talk about as they play, thus when they talk about finding a rabbit,
one pops into the scene. The Hubleys’ visualization of their daughters’ imaginations is
enhanced by the film’s expressive aesthetic, with its hand drawn quality that resembles
children’s drawings.
After John’s death in 1977, Faith continued to work on independent and personal
films. 1997’s autobiographical My Universe Inside Out gives an impressionistic personal
history of Faith’s life. The abstract and impressionistic animation, which often resembles
a Miro painting, takes on a different communicative role than that seen in much of the
work discussed in this chapter. With the Hubleys’ work, we begin to see animation in a
documentary context moving towards a far more interpretive role, rather than seeking to
86
clarify and explain or to substitute in a realist style for absent live action material.
Furthermore, whereas the animation in the state-sponsored experiments of McLaren and
Lye was often only nominally linked to the films’ subject matter, the Hubleys integrated
the (fabricated) visual and the (documentary) aural into a cohesive union that reflected
and articulated the topics and themes of their films.

Conclusion
The different types of application of animation to documentary seen in the
examples cited above can still be found in contemporary practice. Animated segments
are still used in a non-fictional context to clarify, explain and illustrate. The use of
animated maps, charts, graphs and diagrams in formats ranging from television news to
theatrical documentary are too numerous to mention (although Al Gore’s animated
lecture An Inconvenient Truth [2006] stands out as a recent example). The illustrative
function of animation has become so commonplace to the point of being inconspicuous.
Similarly, computer generated animation has become the standard tool for creating
visualizations in science, education and product design.
128

The Leeds Animation Workshop has for many years used animation to educate
and inform on social issues. The workshop was founded in 1976 in Yorkshire in the UK
by a group of women who were driven by the lack of state-funded childcare facilities in
their area to campaign for more nurseries. Initially formed as the Nursery Film Group,
they made Who Needs Nurseries? We Do! (1976) as their first film. In the intervening
three decades the group, which works on a non-profit, cooperative basis, has continued to
87
make films on a variety of topics. Did I Say Hairdressing? I Meant Astrophysics (1998)
subverts themes from traditional stories to challenge the lack of women in science,
engineering and technology. Council Matters (1984) reveals the workings of local
government using cut-outs and cel animation; and Teenage Grief (2007) helps parents
know how to support teenagers through different types of bereavement.
The work of the Leeds Animation Workshop can be thought of as connected to
the political animations made in Eastern Europe in that it “present[s] an argument about
the real social world.”
129
Furthermore, their films present an argument about the real
world and have been dubbed “Woman’s Eye Propaganda.”
130
Their issues-based
animations, however, lack the complex allegory of the Eastern European films, which
necessarily had to mask their meaning behind a safe surface narrative. Rather, the Leeds
Animation films seek an “immediacy and comprehensibility,” so as to be widely
understood by their target audience, something which is specifically achieved through the
use of animation.
131
Their films have a simple, cartoonish aesthetic, which is combined
with an often humorous or lighthearted tone to make the films accessible and easy to
watch. While the aesthetic approach in their films may be uncomplicated and their
arguments easily intelligible, the Workshop tends to present “subject matter through an
unconventional or traditionally unrepresented point of view” in order to challenge the
social status quo.
132
Just as Eastern European filmmakers have used animation to
challenge political regimes and dominant ideologies, the Leeds Animation Workshop has
used the form to question established socio-political mores.

88
Animation is being increasingly used to create moments of interjection in live
action documentaries, often with ironic effect. In films such as Bowling for Columbine
(Michael Moore, 2002), Blue Vinyl (Judith Hefland and Daniel B. Gold, 2002) and She’s
a Boy I Knew (Gwen Haworth, 2007) 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 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 humor of television show South
Park and highlight the absurdity, as perceived by Moore, of America’s relationship with
firearms. In She’s a Boy I Knew, Gwen Haworth interjects animated sections into the
autobiographical account of her gender transition. Retro adverts and magazine extracts
are bought into motion in a segment entitled ‘how to be a girl… by Mom’ that accent in a
lighthearted way the issues Gwen’s mother has with her take on being female. Another
sequence depicting a pre-operation group therapy session in simple line-drawn animation
highlights the bizarre set up of this particular requirement of Gwen’s transition.
Hawthorn has commented that she included animation in her film to “lighten the mood”
and add humor to what she was concerned would otherwise become a too intense and
serious film.
133

The films discussed in this chapter, evidence a hybridization of animation and
documentary. The same can be said of those recent examples mentioned in this
conclusion. If we think of a hybrid as being derived from heterogeneous sources, or
composed of different or incongruous elements, then these films tend to use animation in
89
a pointed way that capitalizes on its distinction from documentary as a media form.
Animation is used for humor, because documentary is traditionally considered serious.
Animation is used to veil the true meaning of a political film, because documentary is
traditionally considered to connect directly to reality. Animation is used to clarify and
explain because diagrams and drawings can help us dissect the meaning of objects and
concepts we encounter in the real world as well as solve abstract problems that cannot be
represented in live action images. The different ways these two incongruous elements,
animation and documentary, are combined goes to make up the rich, nonlinear network
of a history of their mutual utilization.
However, while there is a precedent for the hybridization of animation and
documentary through the utilization of one form by another, the more recent convergence
in the form of the animated documentaries being examined in the following chapters is
different to much of this earlier cross-exploitation. The historical trends I trace here
show a tendency in animation and documentary to adopt aspects of the other medium for
a specific purpose. What these motivations reveal is a desire to explore beyond the
traditional boundaries of what each media form could individually hope to portray. The
historical hybridization is an indication of the limitations of the two forms: that their
producers found it necessary to seek means outside their customary formal boundaries in
order to achieve their goals of expression and communication. Even more so, however,
the hybridization shows that often animation and documentary have very similar
communicative goals, be that to educate or inform or to convey a strong message.

90
The animated documentaries discussed over the following pages have more in
common with the Hubleys’ films based on audio recordings of their children playing in
representing a convergence, rather than a hybridization of the two forms. Convergence is
most often discussed in film and media studies in terms of technologies and media
organizations. Bolter and Grusin, however, have referenced convergence with respect to
media forms.
134
They suggest convergence is remediation under another name and that
remediation, or the process of the representation of one medium within another, has a
double-logic of immediacy and hypermediacy. With the convergence of media forms
such as television and the Internet we get two contradictory, yet mutually dependent
moves: the sense of a direct contact with what a medium represents along with the notion
that any contact is mediated on multiple levels. Thus the hypermediated news webpage
gives a sense of immediate access to world events via a multitude of media formats on a
busy, constantly changing interface. Bolter and Grusin suggest hypermediacy and
immediacy are “opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the
limits of representation and to achieve the real.”
135
Thus, for them, convergence is about
moving closer to the real, in terms of the psychological experience of the viewer. This
suggestion has resonance with the films that will be discussed over the following
chapters, which, I propose, demonstrate the epistemological shift in the nature of
documentary’s status as and embodiment of evidence. The convergence of animation
and documentary into a singular, integrated form has furthered the documentary’s
mission of accessing and representing the real world of lived experience.
91
Chapter I Endnotes

1
Bolter & Grusin, Remediation, 21, n.1.

2
Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media.”

3
Ibid., 18.

4
Ibid., 17; Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 6.

5
Ibid., 155.

6
Wells, Understanding Animation, 16, and “The Beautiful Village and the True Village,” 42;
Patrick “Representing Reality,” 36.

7
A bias that continues to hang over animation (both the medium itself and presumptions about it)
to this day.

8
Also known as ‘chalk talks,’ these acts involved an artist drawing caricatures with impressive
speed whilst also performing a monologue. See Bendazzi, Cartoons: One Hundred Years of
Cinema Animation, 8.

9
Strøm, “The Animated Documentary,” 54.

10
Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, 156.

11
Wells, Understanding Animation, 28.

12
Crafton, Before Mickey, 90.

13
Ibid., 116.

14
Bendazzi, 17.

15
Crafton, 116.

16
Canemaker, 150.

17
Quoted in Canemaker, 154.

18
Bioscope 1919.

19
Ibid.; Canemaker, 152.

20
Bioscope.

92

21
Wells, ‘The Beautiful Village and the True Village,” 4.

22
Canemaker, 156.

23
Hammerton, “Fight for the Dardanelles (1915).”

24
Fleischer, Out of the Inkwell, 27.

25
Ibid.

26
Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up, 13.

27
Ibid., 15.

28
Grierson, quoted in Shale, 16.

29
Shale, 22.

30
Ibid., 24.

31
5-for-4 refers to the government’s offer of five war savings certificates for the price of four.
32
Shale, 53.

33
Maltin, The Disney Films, 4
th
ed., 60.

34
Maltin, Of Mice and Magic, 176; Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 503.

35
Barrier, 501.

36
Ibid., 502-03.

37
Tufte, Envisioning Information, 33.

38
Divide and Conquer (Frank Capra, 1943).

39
Elkins, The Domain of Images, 224.

40
“Disney Combines Live-Action and Animation in New Film” in Victory Through Air Power
press book, 17.

41
“Film Reveals Meaning of War Terms,” in Victory Through Air Power press book, 17.

42
Kinematograph, 26, 34. William R. Weaver in the Motion Picture Herald lauded the
educational aspects of the film, but questioned its viability as an entertainment, but the Monthly
Film Bulletin declares “whatever the arguments about the facts and views, they are presented
entertainingly and with telling emphasis.”

93

43
Maltin, The Disney Films, 64.

44
Raiti, “The Disappearance of Disney Animated Propaganda: A Globalization Perspective,”
155.

45
Raiti, 156.

46
Shale, 112.

47
Ibid.

48
Ibid., 15.

49
Ibid.

50
Ibid., 13; Fleischer, 27.

51
Low, The History of British Film 1906-1914, 157.

52
Ibid.

53
See Boon, Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television.

54
See Beattie, Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video, 129-50.

55
See Amy Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde, 47.

56
Fleischer, 32, 34.

57
Ibid., 34.

58
Ibid.; Maltin, Of Mice and Magic, 90.

59
Fleischer, 34.

60
Ibid., 35.

61
See Low, The History of British Film 1929-1929: Documentary and Educational Films of the
1930s.

62
Ibid., 28.

63
Ibid., 28-29.

94

64
Ibid., 36.

65
Ibid.

66
Roger Horrocks, “Len Lye: Origins of his Art,” 43.

67
See Ellis and McLane, A New History of Documentary Film, 57-76.

68
For example: Housing Problems (1935) was about the movement of poverty stricken slum
dwellers into smart new apartment complexes part-funded by the Gas Board; Many other
documentaries of this period feature a rousing and heroic representation of working life, for
example Drifters (1929), Industrial Britain (1933) and Shipyard (1934).

69
A few years later Grierson would see similar talent in Norman McLaren, whom he brought
down from Glasgow to work with the Film Unit. McLaren saw Lye’s ‘direct’ films and this
influence can be seen in McLaren’s own animation.

70
Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, 136.

71
Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary, 77.

72
The film was part-funded by the London Film Society, an organisation that promoted and
supported independent and avant-garde film.

73
Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, 135. This film no longer exists.

74
Ibid., 137.

75
Curnow and Horrocks, Len Lye: Figures in Motion, 48.

76
Ibid.

77
Horrocks, Len Lye: A biography, 150.

78
Ibid., 151. Footage from Night Mail and Shipyard is particularly noticeable.

79
Ibid, 144.

80
Horrocks, ‘Len Lye: Origins of his Art’, 47.

81
Russett and Starr, Experimental Animation: an illustrated anthology, 65.

82
Ian Christie, “Colour, Music, Dance, Motion. Len Lye in England, 1927-1944,” 186.

83
Ibid.

95

84
Although McLaren also explored direct animation, there is no evidence to suggest that he was
influenced directly by Lye’s work.

85
McLaren, “Animated Film.”

86
The Motion Picture Herald, in their “Product Digest” rationalized the experimental approach to
the subject matter by suggesting the film was aimed at “rural sections’ of the Canadian population
where the limited exposure to media communication meant the “government’s message to the
people must take on new forms.”

87
Jones, Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada,
46.

88
Ibid., 60.

89
Ibid., 66.

90
Jones, The Best Butler in the Business: Tom Daly of the National Film Board of Canada, 59-
60.

91
Ibid., 68.

92
Ibid., 60.

93
Ibid.

94
Ibid.

95
Ibid.

96
Ibid., 66-67.

97
Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949-
1989, 76.

98
Director Stanley Kubrick was inspired by Universe and so impressed by Rain’s work on
Universe that he later hired him as the voice of computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
See Jones, The Best Butler in the Business, 102.

99
Jones, The Best Butler in the Business, 67.

100
Glover quoted in Jones, Movies and Memoranda, 76.

101
Kitson, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey, 33.

102
Liehm and Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, 111.

96

103
Ibid., 107.

104
Ibid., 111.

105
Holloway, “The Short Film in Eastern Europe: Art and Politics of Cartoons and Puppets,” 234.

106
Norsetin quoted in Kitson, 32.

107
Holloway, 229.

108
See, for example, Hames ,“The Film Experiment.”

109
Hames, “Interview with Jan Svankmajer.” 110.

110
O’Pray, “Jan Svankmajer: A Mannerist Surrealist,” 40.

111
Wells, “Body Consciousness in the films of Jan Svankmajer,” 178.

112
Hames, “The Film Experiment,” 37; Hames, “Interview with Jan Svankmajer,” 108.

113
Hames, “Interview with Jan Svankmajer,” 109.

114
Wells, Understanding Animation, 90.

115
Kitson, 42.

116
Ibid., 92.

117
Moritz, “Narrative Strategies for Resistance and Protest in Eastern European Animation,” 41.

118
Kitson, 109-112.

119
Holloway, 236.

120
Wells, Understanding Animation, 238, n.1.

121
Holloway, 247.

122
Wells, Understanding Animation, 100.

123
Ibid.

124
Barrier, 506.

125
Klein, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon, 229.

97

126
Barrier, 512.

127
Hilberman quoted in Barrier, 511.

128
See Tufte The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2
nd
ed. and Envisioning
Information, and Johnson and Hanson, The Visualization Handbook.

129
Ward, Margins of Reality, 84.

130
The Halifax Evening Courier, quoted in Lant, “Women’s Independent Cinema,” 163.

131
Lant, 163.

132
Ibid., 165.

133
Gwen Haworth, conversation with author, August 8, 2008.

134
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, section II.

135
Ibid., 53.
98
CHAPTER II
CLAIMS OF THE REAL: ANIMATED RE-ENACTMENT AND MIMETIC
SUBSTITUTION

Introduction
The first episode of Battle 360 (2008), The History Channel’s series about the exploits of
a US naval aircraft carrier during World War Two, begins with a number of breathtaking
aerial shots.
1
We swoop down the side of the USS Enterprise, taking in the length of this
enormous vessel. We zip pan up to see a squadron of enemy aircraft zeroing-in on the
ship and, just as quickly, are in the position of the pilots, seeing the Enterprise as we
nosedive towards the sea. This kinetic introduction to the historical documentary series
uses computer generated animation to reconstruct historical events in a way that positions
us in the centre of the action, giving us a 360-degree view of the Second World War. A
Why We Fight for the new millennium, the series celebrates the prowess of this “fighting
city of steel,” lauding the twenty battle stars the Enterprise earned during the War. The
message of the program is that America will never bow down in the face of enemy attack,
a message that perhaps had a bittersweet ring of truth at its time of broadcast, as George
W. Bush’s presidency and War on Terror came to a close.
Battle 360, in an echo of Frank Capra’s earlier series, uses animation to clarify
and explain as well as to entertain. As we are introduced to new ships or airplanes,
factual information, such as maximum speed and bomb carriage capacity, is imprinted on
the screen. At one point the program nods more overtly to Why We Fight when an
animated map indicates Japan’s plans for expansion with red sunrays radiating out from
the land of the rising sun into Asia (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). Later, a map of the area
99
around Japan helps illustrate a complicated maneuver involving the launching of bombers
from the carrier. Computer generation allows for the replay of key events from multiple
angles, such as the dramatic moment when a kamikaze pilot narrowly misses the ship,
instead slicing off the tail of a US plane parked on the hangar deck. Digital
reconstruction offers us points of view that could never have been captured by live action
documentary material such as the view from a bomb as it hurtles towards, and narrowly
misses, the Enterprise. Other computer-generated effects are added as much for indirect,
rather than direct, epistemological affect. Frequently, the photorealistic computer
imagery is superimposed with outlines of grids, charts and compass bearings. This lends
the underlying images the official air of navigational charts and military documents.

Figure 2.1: Divide and Conquer (Frank
Capra, 1943)
Figure 2.2: Battle 360, episode 1 (The
History Channel, 2008)

The series combines computer animation with interviews and archival material,
although the distinction between these different components is often blurred. In
particular, computer images are frequently treated to resemble the deteriorated look of the
archival footage and photographs. The sharp clarity of the digital image gives way to
sepia tones and a grainy and blotchy texture, one that mimics the look of decaying film.
In her Bazanian analysis of the Dutch experimental fantasy film Forbidden Quest (1993)
100
Rosalind Galt discusses how, using the example of a historical expedition film, “indexical
affect” is located in the “deterioration of its footage.”
2
Here, problems with the footage,
such as graininess, blurring, missing sections and damaged film become a marker of its
authenticity. In Forbidden Quest the indexical affect of authentic documentary footage
from a historical expedition is absorbed into a fictional narrative framework in a way that
emphasizes the film’s themes of loss. Battle 360 plays on the power of the quality of
aged film to evoke an indexical affect that marks it as authentic archival material. Digital
effects are utilized to mimic the look of decaying archival film and, as such, these images
mimic both the look and the affect of indexical, filmed footage, material that, in this case,
never existed in the first place. Battle 360 goes further in suggesting the epistemological
parity between animation and filmed material when the two are combined to form one
image (see figure 2.3). In this example, as in the others that will be examined in this
chapter, the substitution of indexical-looking animation has an epistemological affect.
Animation adopts the evidential qualities of photographic material, despite its lack of a
physical link with the reality it represents.
The presumption of the indexicality of photographic film and video has, over the
years, lent documentary a particular epistemological weight. This presumption grows out
of a similar one associated with photography. Susan Sontag tells us “photographs furnish
evidence” and reminds us of the camera’s historic use for surveillance and control.
3

Similar evidential claims are proclaimed for documentary, as another medium whose
images were, before the advent of digital image technology, produced using the same
type of photochemical process. The documentary can, the supposition goes, tell us
101
something about the world in which we live because of the unique existential bond, as
Peter Wollen first described it, between film and its object.
4
This “indexical bond of
photochemical and electronic images to that which they represent … provides endless
fascination and a seemingly irrefutable guarantee of authenticity.”
5
Furthermore, Jane
Roscoe and Craig Hight have pointed out that documentary
holds a privileged position within society, a position maintained by
documentary’s claim that it can present the most accurate and truthful
portrayal of the socio-historical world. Inherent to such a claim is the
assumption that there is a direct relationship between the documentary
image and the referent (social world).
6

This assumption prevails despite various postmodern questioning of the
documentary agenda by theorists in the 1990s, the wide availability of digital tools for
manipulating still and moving images, and the continued and rising popularity over the
last ten years of highly manufactured reality television shows.

Figure 2.3: Battle 360 (The History Channel, 2008)

102
Not only is there a prevailing assumption about the significance of documentary’s
indexical link with reality, but there is also a concomitant conflation of the ontology of
photographic technology and the aesthetics of cinematic realism. This conflation leads to
an expectation regarding the visual style of a documentary: that it should ‘look’ like
reality as we experience it. Brian Winston has pointed out that with the rise of direct
cinema in the 1960s and early 1970s this style of fly-on-the-wall documentary
filmmaking became established as “the dominant model for contemporary Anglo-Saxon
documentary.”
7
The production of documentaries that offered a glimpse into the life of
rock stars and politicians led to an increased popularity of the form among the general
audience. As a result we came to associate non-interventionist, realist style with what a
documentary should look like.
Around the same time that the connection between indexicality and realist style
was being made by documentary audiences, Peter Wollen was drawing a theoretical
connection that has had an ongoing impact on the study of documentary film. While
Andre Bazin did not use the term “indexical” in his discussion of cinema, Wollen
observes, “Bazin repeatedly stresses the existential bond between sign and object which,
for Peirce, was the determining characteristic of the indexical sign.”
8
In making this
observation, Wollen was making a connection between Charles Sanders Peirce’s
semiotics and Bazin’s ontology of photography. Significantly, Wollen goes on to point
out “whereas Peirce made his observation in order to found a logic, Bazin wished to
found an aesthetic.”
9
This claim deserves further investigation, because it hints at the
root of the blurring of two different elements of Bazin’s theories of cinema: the
103
ontological and the stylistic. This is a blurring that has given rise to a slippage between
two of Peirce’s signs – the icon and the index. Whereas indexes are physically bonded
with the objects they represent, an icon is “a sign which represents its object mainly by its
similarity to it.”
10

It is easy to see how this slippage has taken place when you consider certain parts
of Bazin’s seminal essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” He spends much
of the first half of the essay discussing resemblance in the plastic arts and how this is
driven by our psychological need to preserve life. Things like portraiture, statuary and
the camera obscura demonstrate a history of endeavoring to replicate the world as we see
it. We have historically, according to Bazin, developed mediums and styles of artistic
representation to recreate the world in increasingly realistic, or mimetic, ways. When he
talks of photography and film being the teleological culmination of this quest, this
implies that photography’s most important characteristic is its resemblance to reality,
rather than its indexical link to it.
However, he also notes that, in art, there has existed a “confusion between the
aesthetic and the psychological.”
11
This confusion resulted in a conflation of “true
realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both concretely and its
essence, and the pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter
the mind).”
12
Photography and cinema settle this confusion because, through their
mechanical processes of image production, “we are forced to accept as real the existence
of the object reproduced, actually re-presented.”
13
There is no confusion between “true
realism” and “pseudorealism” in photography and film because of the process by which
104
these media re-present reality. The chemical process involved in the production of
photographic and filmed images entails a causal relationship between original and image,
a relationship that Roland Barthes likens to an umbilical chord that links the viewer to the
objects or people represented in the image.
14
As such, while also producing images that
resemble reality, film and photography freeze a moment of reality for all eternity and, in
so doing, satisfy our need to preserve the present. Barthes emphasizes this spiritual
aspect to photography and its ability to “mechanically [repeat] what could never be
repeated existentially.”
15

Photography and film’s ontological uniqueness is not, then, to do with what they
look like and the “codes or perceptual cues for spatial likeness do not in themselves
constitute that evidence for the existence of the referent, which is definitive of indexical
credibility.”
16
Barthes claims that the noeme, or nature, of photography is not to do with
analogy and it is not photography’s ability to create an accurate likeness that makes it
stand out from other representational arts.
17
Similarly, Bazin claims “no matter how
fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image
may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of
which it is the reproduction; it is the model.”
18
As such, Bazin is denying a necessary
association between the existential bond of film and reality and the way the filmic image
should look. Wollen points this out when he notes that “realism, for Bazin, had little to
do with mimesis … It was the existential bond between fact and image, world and film,
which counted for most in Bazin’s aesthetic, rather than any quality of similitude or
resemblance.”
19
Philip Rosen concurs that Bazin makes no provision for what the
105
indexical image should look like and that “indexicality implies nothing necessary about
the form of the signifier even in relation to the referent, nothing for example about
whether the signifier ‘looks like’ the referent. (Does a weather vane “look like” the
wind?).”
20
Rosen is in agreement with Peirce who tells us “a piece of mould with a
bullet-hole in it is sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole
there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not.”
21
An index remains
an index, even if no one recognizes it to be so.
The mimesis of photographic and film images is a by-product of what,
psychologically, is essential for the satisfaction of our desire to preserve things after they
die. For Barthes, the link between photography and death is of essential importance.
Photographs are an “emanation of a past reality” and as such both bring the dead back to
us, just as they remind us of the inevitable demise of their subjects.
22
It is the direct,
physically causal relationship between object and image that leads us, as Dudley Andrew
puts it, to “venerate” objects such as fingerprints and shrouds, “not because they look like
the originals, but because they were produced by direct contact with the objects they call
up.”
23
Our “mummy complex” is what drives our desire to represent things as they are in
reality, a desire that was finally satisfied, Bazin claims, by photography and film – not
because they look like reality, but because they physically retain a link with the past
through their existential, indexical, connection to whatever is placed in front of them at
the moment the image is first created.
24

Bazin’s theory of film language grew out of his beliefs regarding the ontology of
the photographic image. It could be thought of then, as a stylistics originating in a
106
metaphysics, or a theory of film aesthetics that is based in its fundamental, essential
ability to retain a physical link with the objects of its image. Bazin extolled the virtues
of non-interventionist filmmaking because these techniques, he argued, were best suited
to the fundamental nature of the cinematic form. Thus he praises the long-take, deep-
focus cinema of Orson Welles and William Wyler. He was also particularly in favor of
Italian neorealism, which he called a “form of self-effacement before reality.”
25

Conversely, he was critical of montage editing, which he called “anticinematic,” because
it distracted from the reality in front of the camera.
26
The power of the film image, for
Bazin, arises from its ability to “lay bare reality” and this could best be done in a style
that maintained the physical and spatial as it is in our own direct experience rather than
the juxtaposition of shots that disrupt space and time.
What we can take from Bazin is that while indexicality does not necessitate a
mimetic, non-interventionist style of filmmaking this is still the style that is most suited
to the ontology of photographic media. Therefore, the fact that aesthetic realism evokes
an “indexical affect” is not purely due to a theoretical slippage between the index and the
icon, but rather that in practice these two signs often occur simultaneously. Similarly, if
in the case of documentary we take aesthetic realism to imply an observational style of
non-intervention it is often the case that these examples are actually portraying events as
they occurred and that there genuinely is an indexical link between the image and the
object. Thus, through the dominance of direct cinema style, which still pervades
mainstream television and cinema documentary, comes the prejudice that for
documentary to carry epistemological weight, for it to be able to claim to say anything
107
about the historical world (as opposed to an imaginary world, to use Bill Nichols’s
distinction), it has to look like reality.
27
For indexical imagery to have evidential weight
it must look like reality re-presented with the minimum of intervention. Similarly, a
slippage occurs between the realist style and indexicality when images presented in this
way are presumed to have the evidential weight of indexical signs. Indexes, it seems,
must also be icons, and vice versa, at least when it comes to the world of documentary.
The conflation of index and icon in documentary arises, then, in part because our
need to preserve the past is often justifiably satisfied by these films. They also answer a
“basic expectation held by the documentary viewer; that the desire to know will find
gratification during the course of the film.”
28
This expectation is wrapped up in our
reception of documentary realism, which “aligns itself with [this] epistephilia,”
29
as Bill
Nichols has termed it. The alignment of documentary with realism means that
traditionally documentaries have promised to satisfy the viewer’s epistephilia regarding
the world. As such, documentaries become evidence of the historical world of shared
experience in which we all live. In this way “documentary … conventions … call for
evidence drawn from the historical world indexically, as it was seen and heard to
occur.”
30
A documentary viewer could be forgiven, then, for expecting to see the sorts of
observable things that they too could have been eyewitness to, had they been present at
the events being depicted.
In this chapter, I am addressing animated, or partially animated, documentaries
that offer us this type of traditional, observable, “documentary” knowledge. These are
examples of the mimetic substitution I outlined in the Introduction, in which animation is
108
used to stand-in for live-action in a way that mimics the style of both reality and
photoreality.
31
In the animated sections in the examples under consideration here, the
indexical link with reality is entirely absent. However, I will suggest that the style of
animation, and the way it is presented, is emulating the “indexical affect” of traditional
documentary material. As such, these examples are trading on the epistemological
promises of indexicality and the long-held assumption that equates aesthetic realism with
an existential link with reality. Thus, animation used in this way works to satisfy the
basic human desire that underpins Bazin’s realism - the psychological need to embalm
reality. Animation, however, does not have a direct physical link with the reality it is
representing, and thus begs the question of what reality, exactly, is being embalmed in
these examples.
I will discuss three examples that use animation to reconstruct events for which
no live action footage exists. Walking with Dinosaurs, the BBC’s successful natural
history series broadcast in 1999, uses both computer animation and animatronics to bring
prehistory to life. Ten years later, The History Channel digitally pre-constructed a future
planet without humans in Life After People (2008). And finally, Brett Morgen’s 2007
documentary Chicago 10 uses animation to reconstruct the events surrounding the trial of
members of the anti-war movement accused of inciting riots during the 1968 Democratic
National Convention in Chicago. The dinosaurs walked the Earth hundreds of millions of
years before the invention of the motion picture camera; we cannot film what has yet to
happen, and no cameras were permitted in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom in 1969. In
109
all three cases animation becomes a “sincere and justifiable” tool for visual
reconstruction.
32

Galt claims that in Forbidden Quest the indexical affect of the documentary
footage reinforces the significance of the fictional narrative in which it is placed. The
“exemplary theoretical effect of authenticity” of the grainy, blurred documentary footage
is “mobilize[d] … in the service of witnessing a false history.”
33
Although Galt is
discussing a fictional film, her argument points to the importance of context when
considering the affect of indexical material. Essential to the indexical affect of the
documentary material in Forbidden Quest is both how it is knitted into the fictional text
and the audience’s awareness of its status as footage from early twentieth-century polar
expeditions. An important point here is that the indexical affect resonates through both
its textual context and extratextual knowledge on the part of the viewer.
Whereas in Rosalind Galt’s case study the indexical affect was evoked through
the indexicality of documentary images used in a fictional context, the examples I am
considering use animated imagery in a documentary context. In Battle 360, digitally
animated reconstructions are seamlessly interwoven with more conventional
documentary material such as interviews with military personnel and veterans of the
Enterprise as well as archival images. The faked indexicality of the animated images
evokes a sense of epistemological authenticity not only through the look of the computer
generated images, but also through their placement within a documentary (con)text. In
all three examples examined below I explore how animation that mimics the look of both
reality and filmed documentary footage further corroborates the substitutive validity of
110
this animated imagery through textual and extratextual framing. Techniques such as
authoritative voice-over, documentary interviews and archival footage work in tandem
with the digitally created images to create a convincing documentary ‘whole.’
Furthermore, associated media such as websites, press releases and behind the scenes
programs back up the epistemological claims of all three examples.
Bill Nichols has pointed out that the impression of indexicality is far more
important in creating a sense of authenticity, and consequently satisfying our epistephilia,
than an actual existential bond between image and original.
34
In fact, while “indexicality
plays a key role in authenticating the documentary image’s claims to the historically real
… the authentication itself must come from elsewhere.”
35
Philip Rosen claims that “the
documentary tradition has rarely supposed that the photographic/ cinematic ‘impression
of reality’ is, in itself, sufficient for knowledge.”
36
This “impression of reality” can be
formed in a variety of ways, through the look of the image itself as well as the context in
which it is placed. Furthermore, often a degree of extratextual knowledge is required on
the part of the viewer in order for epistephilia to be entirely satisfied. This can take the
form of publicity material surrounding a film or, more simply, captions that identify the
origin of the indexical material we are watching that position it geographically and
temporally. It takes us knowing, from another source, that the images are genuine in
order for us to afford them epistemological validity.
However, in the examples I am addressing here, the animated images have no
indexical validity in their own right. Furthermore, extratextual knowledge regarding the
production of the images only goes to emphasize their lack of indexicality and their
111
purely constructed, fabricated nature. The way in which non-indexical images are
packaged to create historical and scientific ‘evidence’ in these cases is more complex
than a mere validation through textual and extratextual framing. A constant tension is
created through the presentation of is-it-isn’t-it-real fragments in a coherent documentary
whole in which, as Craig Hight has observed, ontological complexity is elided so as not
to trouble the viewer.
37
This elision occurs, as we shall see, through the unproblematized
presentation of realistic animated images within a framework of documentary indicators.
What this suggests is that the psychological desire for the mummification of the present
through visual images, a desire that was once satisfied by photography and film, is now
being satisfied through animation. Perhaps, after all, it is not the existential bond that
matters, but rather just an indexical affect of a link to our past/present/future reality.

Walking with Dinosaurs and the Impression of Indexicality
Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) was the first in a series of BBC natural history
programming that digitally documents both prehistoric life and the evolution of early
humans. The six-part Walking with Dinosaurs series has spawned a Walking with…
franchise of, to date, two further series on pre-historic animals (Walking with Beasts
(2001) and Walking with Monsters (2005)), one series on the evolution of mankind
(Walking with Cavemen (2003)), as well as several one-off specials and spin-off series on
dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts.
38
All of the series and specials employ a combination of
digital animation, animatronics and live-action backgrounds to reconstruct the world of
the dinosaurs and cavemen. This endeavor is ensconced in a long tradition of quality
112
natural history broadcasting on BBC, one cemented by David Attenborough in the 1970s,
that allows viewers a privileged view of the animal kingdom. In fact, Karen D. Scott and
Anne M. White observe that Walking with Dinosaurs makes several overt nods to the
history of BBC nature and wildlife documentaries through the replication of iconic
images from earlier Attenborough documentaries.
39

Walking with Dinosaurs was conceived by producer and ex-zoologist Tim Haines,
who, several years earlier, had been impressed and inspired by Jurassic Park (1993) and
the way that film used technology to bring dinosaurs back to life.
40
The intention for the
television series, however, was to go beyond fictional fantasy and to “create the most
accurate portrayal of prehistoric animals ever seen on the screen.”
41
This involved the
help of a consultant paleontologist and myriad other scientific experts who advised on all
aspects of prehistoric life, from the climate to plant life.
42
The animation was created by
a small team at the London-based company FrameStore, whose work was composited
with footage of animatronic models that had been filmed at suitably prehistoric-looking
locations, such as New Caledonia and the Redwood National Park in California.
43
The
endeavor involved two year’s worth of research, animation, filming and post-production,
and the reported budget of £6million made the series the most expensive documentary
series produced by BBC.
44

The six episodes take the viewer on a chronological rise-and-fall journey from the
evolution of the dinosaurs during the late Triassic period to their extinction in the late
Cretaceous, 150 million years later. Each episode focuses on a few major dinosaurs of
the period being covered as well as spotlighting a particular type of habitation
113
environment and, as such, we get specific insight as well as a general overview of the
subject matter. In particular, one of the selling points of the series was the opportunity to
get the type of knowledge traditionally offered by natural history programming, such as
intimate views of animal life. For example, Episode Four looks at the giant flying
dinosaur Ornithocheirus and its mating cycle and Episode Six shows us the social habits
of the Leallynasarus, who survived through freezing Antarctic winters. The dinosaurs’
journey is narrated, with a tone of authority, by the British actor and director Kenneth
Branagh, better known for his Shakespearean adaptations and, more recently, roles in
quality television historical docudramas such as Shackleton (2002) and Conspiracy
(2001) that reconstructed significant historical events.
The high cost and duration of production paid dividends as the programs gained
record viewing figures for a documentary (of any type) on the BBC with 18.9 million
viewers for the first episode.
45
The initial critical response was equally positive. The
Guardian’s Nancy Banks-Smith applauded the visual grandeur of the show, saying,
“visually, it’s a bobby dazzler,” admiring that “the dinosaurs are computer generated
down to the rippling twitch of their diminishing tails.”
46
Similarly, Robert Hanks, who
calls the series “simply marvellous,” praises the look of the dinosaurs as “staggeringly
real” and “full of striking details.”
47
The critics laud the series for its visual realism, its
verisimilitude to how we expect dinosaurs to look and move. The critics did object,
however, to the seamless presentation of provable facts and scientific speculation. There
was a large element of supposition involved in the look and sound of the creatures.
While shape and size could be accurately gauged from fossils, skin texture and color
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were extrapolated from “the natural rules that govern how modern animals are colored.”
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Furthermore, one of the ways the series emulates the Attenborough-style BBC nature
documentaries is through its focus on dinosaur behavior. In particular, mating, eating and
killing make up a large amount of the screen time. Producer Tim Haines refers to the
“stories” the series tells and comments that “none of these … are testable – we will never
know 100% if they are right – but we were absolutely determined that nothing would be
provably wrong.”
49
The presentation of this guesswork troubled many critics, including
Nancy Smith-Banks who complained “the commentary sounded surer of itself than the
facts warranted.”
50
Both she and Joe Joseph criticize the voiceover description of the
mating patterns of the small mammalian Cynodonts. “Wasn’t it over-egging it when
Kenneth Branagh … told us how faithful cynodonts were to their spouses and how they
spent their lives in a burrow with their one true love?” asked Joseph.
51
In general the
criticism regarding the way the series “finesses the line between fact and speculation”
was leveled more against the dinosaurs’ behavior than their look or sound.
52

Scientific experts were more scathing of the series, verging from “mildly critical”
to “downright hostile” in their response.
53
They variously accuse it of being
“irresponsible,” going “too far,” and being nothing more than a “bedtime story” and
“dinosaur soap opera.”
54
Like the television critics, the scientists are troubled by the way
Branagh’s authoritative voiceover smoothly elides the proven and the hypothesized.
They also think that the narrative structure of the episodes, the “stories” as Tim Haines
calls them, “leaves little room for discussion or qualification [making] it impossible for
the viewer to decide whether they are witnessing something that is considered to be
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likely, possible, merely hypothetical or just plain wrong.”
55
The blurring of the known
and the theorized causes further anxiety through the presentation of unverifiable scientific
hypotheses via a visually realistic style. Robert McKie claims that “verisimilitude [is]
fine when dealing with the present but not so acceptable when dealing with the very
distant past.”
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Presumably, McKie’s consternation is driven by the impossibility of
verifying much of the information presented in the series and that, as such, its realist
visual style is potentially misleading.
At the root of this complaint is a point emphasized by Anneke M. Metz. She
criticizes the use of CGI (computer-generated imagery) in primetime television science
documentaries because “there is no telling whether the subject in question was actually
photographed directly (thus providing a direct indexical linkage to the subject) or
computer-generated (with the concomitant possibility that what is depicted is pure
fiction).”
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In essence, she is implying that if something looks real, then we will presume
that it is real. This is what worries the naysayer scientists regarding Walking with
Dinosaurs, that the audience will take hypothesis as fact because the material is presented
in a visually, as well as aurally and narratively, compelling package. This anxiety over
Walking with Dinosaurs shows how the construction of an indexical affect carries with it
an epistemological presumption – that what we are being shown is evidence of something
that actually happened.
Walking with Dinosaurs employs a photorealistic style of animation whereby the
animation is designed to not only look like reality as we experience it, but more
importantly to mimic reality as it is re-presented on film. Michael O’Pray has compared
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the style of photorealism animation to trompe l’oeil painting, in that part of the appeal of
these films comes from our “thrill to the virtuosity of the means of representation
itself.”
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A similar kind of pleasure is elicited from the viewers of Walking with
Dinosaurs who, as shall be discussed further below, are invited to marvel at the means by
which the prehistoric world is brought back to life in such a realistic way. Furthermore,
the verisimilitude in Walking with Dinosaurs has several different visual references.
Firstly, the dinosaurs look, move and sound as science would expect them to. The series’
producers paid great attention to fossil evidence in bringing their dinosaurs to life, often
dispelling previously held misconceptions.
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Additionally, the series’ visual
representation mimics that of two styles of filmmaking: the observational footage of
nature documentaries and the feature film Jurassic Park. The first of these references
determines our expectation of what prehistoric natural history programming should look
like. The Hollywood blockbuster Jurassic Park, on the other hand, would have been the
primary source of comparison, in terms of what dinosaurs looked like, for most viewers.
Producer Tim Haines was aware that “he needed to ensure that his dinosaur protagonists
did not depart too radically from their digital predecessors as envisioned by Spielberg,
since this image was still fresh in the minds of viewers.”
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Thus, even if viewers make a
distinction between the fictionalized world of Jurassic Park and the supposedly real
world of Walking with Dinosaurs, the Spielberg blockbuster remains a lingering visual
reference.
If the dinosaur ‘protagonists’ resemble the creatures we saw on the big screen in
the early-1990s, the style of ‘filming’ in Walking with Dinosaurs takes its cues from the
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traditions of small screen television nature documentary. During Episode Four (Giant of
the Skies) we are afforded the Ornithocheirus-eye-view of a herd of Iguanadon ambling
along a sandy beach identified in the voiceover as the ‘southern tip of North America,’
mimicking the aerial shots familiar from countless wildlife films. The telephoto lens
camerawork frequently used in natural history programming to reveal detail from a
distance is similarly copied throughout the series. For example in Episode One (New
Blood) we see in intimate close-up the carnivorous Coelophysis preying on a Cynodonts’
burrow, successfully catching and devouring one of the young, a shot that could only
have been captured (in a traditional natural history documentary) using a telephoto lens
so as not to disturb animals in the wild. The copying of the visual tropes of hunting
scenes from nature documentary adds a sense of authenticity to the Walking with
Dinosaurs animation.
This sense of authenticity is further amplified through several moments in the
series that imply a co-presence of camera and living dinosaur. Episode Five features a
section where we see the Laellynasaura feeding during the arctic winter. Branagh tells us
that the filmmakers are utilizing “image enhancement” to better see the behavior of the
animals under the cover of darkness. As he says this, the style of animation changes
instantly, as if at the flick of a switch, to mimic the look of a night vision camera with
grainy, green-tinged black and white footage. In the next episode the ‘camera’ tracking
the fearsome T-Rex catches the full force of the beast’s roar as its spittle splatters the
‘lens.’ These visual cues to authenticity are entirely unnecessary within the schema of
the individual episodes and could, in fact, potentially jolt the viewer out of the seamless
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narrative of the episode’s story. However, whereas a participant directly addressing the
film crew/camera in a fly-on-the-wall observational documentary disrupts the pretence of
the invisibility of the filmmakers and their non-intervention in events (think of Little Edie
flirting with David Maysles in Grey Gardens (1975)) these moments in Walking with
Dinosaurs intentionally draw our attention to the imagined filmic apparatus and in so
doing mask the presence of the computer software responsible for the scene. They are a
covert claim that this is what ‘real’ footage of dinosaurs would have looked like had
cameras been around to film them in the first place. As such, they operate similarly to
“markers of indexicality,” to borrow Philip Rosen’s term, which testify to the authenticity
of indexical traces such as photographic and filmic images.
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Whereas a genuine
indexical trace “derives its current authenticity from the fact that it was present in the past
yet survives to the present,”
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these faked markers add epistemological weight to
constructed imagery through our association of these types of devices – the use of night
vision and an unexpected interaction of animal subject and camera – with genuine
documentary footage.
The complex tension between the elision of the faked status of the animated
imagery (through its photorealistic style) and the attempt to impress the audience with the
sophistication of the techniques used to recreate prehistoric life is witnessed in the
Making of Walking with Dinosaurs (1999). This 50-minute special was aired two days
after the premiere of Episode 1 on BBC1. The timing of the broadcast, the fact that it
was shown before the second episode and would also coincide with any reviews of the
first episode, indicates the intention behind the special to both validate the scientific
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information being given in the series as well as to justify its style of presentation. In fact,
the episode indirectly responds to many of the points raised in the critics’ initial response
to the first episode, which appeared in the press the day before the Making of episode was
aired.
The opening voiceover establishes the epistemological claims of the series when
narrator Kenneth Branagh states
If a film crew ventured back 65 million years they would be among
dinosaurs in their natural habitat; they could bring back unique images of a
time when reptiles ruled on earth; images we thought we’d never see.
This is exactly what the makers of the TV series Walking with Dinosaurs
wanted to achieve: a portrait of a lost world as it really was.
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The claim that Walking with Dinosaurs is showing us dinosaurs as they would have been
filmed, had that been possible, is emphasized by the images the voiceover accompanies.
As we hear Branagh’s assuring words, we see live-action footage of a film crew carrying
equipment into a clearing. The crew stops in their tracks as they hear an ominous distant
roaring, only continuing when the coast seems clear. As the crew set up their camera, a
computer generated Tyrannosaurus walks into the clearing, and into the frame of their
shot. The feeling of eyewitnessed material that is evoked by the series’ photorealistic
animation is reinforced in this, albeit comedic, opening sequence of the behind-the-
scenes documentary.
The veracity of the information presented in the series is corroborated by the
opinions of several expert advisors featured in the Making of episode. Segments that
describe the creation of the animation and the animatronic models are cut together with
scenes of paleontologist Peter Larson and his team excavating a T-Rex skeleton in South
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Dakota. Larson lies in the dust as he gently scrapes away dirt from a prehistoric bone and
tells us that contemporary paleontologists are now using evidence from excavations like
this to theorize dinosaur behavior. Another advisor, Dr. David Norman, sits in a lab and
claims “it’s not unreasonable to suspect that many dinosaurs were colorful in many ways
and used color in various aspects of their behavior. So there’s no harm in introducing
colors to reconstructions.” Through the words of these two scientific experts the BBC
astutely offsets two of the major criticisms of the series, the presentation as ‘fact’ of
hypotheses regarding dinosaur behavior and certain aspects of their appearance, and
backs up the authoritative voiceover we hear from Kenneth Branagh in the actual series
episodes.
The Making of special also reveals the efforts of the animators as they strive to
make the digital footage of the dinosaurs look as realistic as possible. Animator Virgil
Manning talks of the difficulty of animating the Tyrannosaurus in motion as the
dinosaur’s large size means he has to use lots of “squash and stretch,” a traditional
animation technique in which a parts of a character or object are manipulated, squashed
and stretched to simulate natural movement, around the feet and ankles to convey a sense
of its five ton weight. We also see Visual Effects Supervisor Mike McGee showing how
computer technology is used to seamlessly blend the animated dinosaurs into the filmed
backgrounds. McGee expertly manipulates the computer software to match the color of
the dinosaurs to the surroundings as well as to create shadows and to break up the shafts
of light that are filtered through the trees as a dinosaur moves through a forest setting.
James Moran has argued for the inclusion of special effects, in the form of manipulated
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rather than automatic photographic effects, in documentary practice “if for no reason
other than that they offer to human view a ‘document’ of the unseen but not unreal.”
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He tells us that “documentaries of the prehistoric subject must experiment in the domain
of the image, as the unstable nature of the fossil, the subject’s only claim to indexicality
and scientific truth, necessitates an unconventional means of reimagination and re-
presentation.”
65
These words can encourage us to think of the digital technology used to
create the Walking with Dinosaurs animation as a descendent of previously acceptable
mechanical enhancements of human vision, such as zoom lenses and microscopes, which
allow us to see more than we could with the naked eye.
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Just as Percy Smith, eighty
years earlier, used cameras and animation techniques to reveal the wonder of nature, so to
are the producers of Walking With Dinosaurs exploiting developments in vision and
imaging technology to show us the natural world.
The photorealistic animation of Walking with Dinosaurs, which presents the
dinosaurs as we would expect them to look, is a significant factor in the series’
impression of indexicality. The animation is trading on the viewer’s association of the
iconic and the indexical and our presumption that if something looks like reality (or what
we expect reality to look like) then we can afford it the epistemological weight of an
index. That is, that it is a special, higher class of evidence and that our witnessing this
image is tantamount to witnessing the event in person. This quasi-indexicality is
bolstered by the words and delivery of Branagh’s voiceover as well as the extratextual
information surrounding the series such as the Making of episode. The timing of the
latter, in particular, implies its intention as an epistemological validation of the
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information in the main series. Nichols and Rosen both point out that indexicality itself
is often not enough and that the images require further corroboration. In this case, the
Making of episode corroborates the validity of the faked-indexical images even while it
shows us exactly how these images were constructed. James Moran articulates that
“what seems most necessary to the credibility of dinosaur imagery rests not so much
upon its perception as an unmediated record of reality as upon the spectator’s trust that
the images, as documentary, were generated in good faith.”
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The Making of episode
reinforces this idea, confirming to a potentially skeptical audience that the images were
created “in good faith” and under the advice of leading scientists undertaking cutting-
edge paleontological research.
The sum result of Walking with Dinosaurs’ indexical affect is that the series
offers us the kind of knowledge that is typically offered by documentary realism founded
on the indexical bond with reality. That is, knowledge we could potentially be
eyewitness to had we observed the events in person. If, as Nichols claims, the impression
of indexicality is sufficient to satisfy our documentary epistephilia, it is just this that
caused critics of Walking with Dinosaurs anxiety: that our epistephilic satisfaction is in
fact unjustified. Some of the scientists critical of the series could argue that the
recreation was not “generated in good faith” as much of it was based on guesswork. This
anxiety arises because the photorealistic digital images are affording the information in
the series an epistemological weight it arguably does not deserve. Even though we know
that these dinosaur images are not an “unmediated record of reality,” their photorealistic
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style still carries with it, by mimetic association, a trace of the epistemological promise of
indexicality.
The idea, however, that a documentary could be based on hypothesized or
extrapolated knowledge is not unique to this example. Bill Nichols calls these types of
documentaries “conditional,” in that they “direct us toward an imaginary extrapolation
from the present world, based on factual evidence.”
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Walking with Dinosaurs
extrapolated living, breathing prehistoric animals from the scientific information gained
from fossils and other physical evidence. The team behind the series has also
extrapolated into both the future and outer space with their Space Odyssey: Voyage to the
Planets (2004) series, in which we accompany the five astronauts of the Pegasus on a
tour of the solar system. In the next section I will look at another example of future
extrapolation and examine this within the context of scholarship on conditional,
hypothesized documentaries.

Extrapolating the Future in Life After People
If Walking with Dinosaurs is using scientific evidence to imagine the planet before
humans, Life After People is its temporal opposite, imagining what would happen in the
years, decades and centuries after we leave. This two-hour program, which aired on the
History Channel in the US in January 2008 and a few months later in the UK on Channel
4, uses computer technology to create digital, photorealistic images of a world that slowly
returns to nature after humans become mysteriously extinct. Flora creeps up familiar
landmarks, their invasive destructiveness leading to the toppling of iconic buildings such
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as the Eiffel Tower. London is flooded by encroaching rivers and Rome is destroyed by
the wildfires that go untended. Wild animals flourish in their natural habitats, whereas
domestic pets languish in the absence of their human protectors. The program predicts
that within ten thousand years of the demise of the human race virtually all vestiges of the
human race will have disappeared with evidence of our existence remaining only through
the ruins of a few massive structures such as the Great Wall of China.
“Time,” we are told, in no uncertain terms in the declarative tones of a British-
accented narrator, “has run out for man.” The program takes us on a timeline from one
day to ten thousand years after the disappearance of humans. As the fabric of human life
decays the program relies increasingly on computer imagery. In early scenes that
describe the first days of our absence a typical documentary combination of observational
and re-enacted filmed footage is seen. The description of the plight of domestic dogs,
hungry for food and with no humans to provide it, is heard over scenes of the pets
escaping from suburban houses and foraging in alleyway garbage cans. Similar to actors
performing witnessed or typical events, here trained dogs reconstruct the predicted and
expected.
Even a year later, when plants are beginning to grow over manmade structures
and the objects of our daily life, much of the imagery is indexical. Shots were obtained
in actual locations and objects already suffering from this fate, such as a rusting
abandoned car that has been overtaken by foliage, with plants growing out of its windows
and weeds poking out from under the hood. However, digital imagery is used to copy the
time-lapse photography familiar from nature documentaries as we see the rapid growth of
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plants and moss over a city street. Later, once we are further into the future, wild animals
are digitally placed in the overgrown environs of once urban areas. A lion pads through
the undergrowth of the Mall in Washington D.C. while a tiger hunts in the jungle-like
grounds of the White House. The digital visualizations of the future are verified by being
intercut with images from the present where man’s abandonment has already allowed
structures to ruin. Images of New York City streets disappearing beneath a sea of green
foliage are juxtaposed with a geochemist sitting on overgrown stone steps, saying of
them, “if we came back in five years they would be almost impossible to find.”
Predictions for twenty years hence are supported by footage from the Ukrainian city
Pripyat, which was abandoned overnight after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
The computer generated scenes from the human-free future mimic the look of the decay
and ruin that has overtaken this once “most modern city in Europe.”
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Unlike Walking with Dinosaurs, Life After People has a directly observed point of
visual reference. There is much we do not know about the living, breathing manifestation
of dinosaurs, but we do already have visible evidence of the environmental impact of
human neglect. By juxtaposing the faked indexical-looking computer animated images
of the future with indexical images of contemporary examples, Life After People is
making claims for the epistemological validity of its digital images. The impact of the
digital imagery relies on it looking realistic, which in turn encourages us to believe that
this could really happen.
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In the same way that Walking with Dinosaurs had to be
careful not to stray too far from our expectations regarding dinosaur appearance, Life
After People bases its images on those with which we are already familiar.
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The scientific basis for Life After People is both more overt, yet less substantial,
than Walking with Dinosaurs. Life After People places the bodies and voices of its expert
advisers within the text of the program, foregrounding their legitimation of the images
and voiceover narration that describe the fate of an uninhabited planet.
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However, this
authorization lacks the hard scientific research of the paleontologists who appear in the
Making of Walking with Dinosaurs. In Life After People the visualized future is based
less on research and more on mental extrapolation, with experts using their knowledge of
the present to imagine what the future might be like if we were not here. There is, after
all, no hard, tangible fossil evidence from a future world without humans.
In the way that the program extrapolates a disastrous future at the hands of
humanity, it bears some resemblance to Peter Watkins’ 1964 film The War Game.
Watkins’ prediction of the catastrophic effects of a nuclear attack on Britain has been
discussed as a “conditional” documentary by both Bill Nichols and Paul Ward.
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The
label of conditional is borrowed from the grammatical tense, and is applied because the
premise of the film depends on supposition about likely outcomes of a possible event that
is contingent upon certain factors such as the British government’s plan in the advent of a
nuclear attack. Ward, following Richard Kilborn and John Izod, gives the conditional
documentary more weight than Bill Nichols by claiming that “they refer to the actual
world of the viewer but the crucial characteristic is that certain aspects of the text are
provisional, or are dependent on such-and-such happening.”
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This is counter to Nichols,
who thinks they are a view of an imaginary world. Ward is therefore rooting the
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conditional documentary firmly in the realm of our knowledge of the social, political and
historical world.
Documentaries about things that could have happened, or could still happen, are
variously described as subjunctive, conditional and hypothetical and there has been a
certain amount of blurring of these terms.

Ward attempts to unpack the use of
“conditional’ and “subjunctive,” by understanding the subjunctive to refer to things that
are yet to happen. While he acknowledges Glenn Erickson’s suggestion of “negative
subjunctive” films, which depict historical events that could have but did not happen,
Ward prefers to use the conditional to mean “an engagement with and attempt to
represent historical events in such a way as to draw attention to their provisional or
conditional nature.”
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Ward is thinking about the films he discusses in terms of their grammatical tense,
or the temporal position of their framing. It is harder, he concedes, to discuss a film
about a possible historical event as a conditional film when it is really presenting the
events in the straightforward past tense, as things that did happen.
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However, Wolf has
discussed the subjunctive documentary, particularly with reference to “computer imaging
and simulation” as films that are “concerned with what could be, would be, or might have
been.”
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Taking a cue from Wolf, it may be more helpful for us to consider conditional, or
subjunctive, documentaries less in terms of our temporal position relative to the events
depicted (as Ward does) and more in terms of their epistemological status. This is,
perhaps, more in line with the way Alisa Lebow has discussed documentaries about the
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future. She prefers to think of the types of films discussed by Ward and others that pre-
enact a possible future as based on hypothetical knowledge.
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What are the epistemological implications of the fact that much of the information
presented in Walking with Dinosaurs and Life After People is hypothetical? Ward has
argued for conditional tense documentaries to be thought of as mockumentaries: “their
mode of address is one that mocks (in a serious way) the conventions of certain types of
documentary, and makes the viewer interrogate their relationship to this so-called history
they are viewing.”
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They are asking us to question the likelihood of the events being
portrayed and, in turn, if what we are watching could possibly be a documentary.
However, Craig Hight has argued the opposite with regard to what he calls the “graphic
vérité” mode of digital documentary, which use digital techniques to create photorealistic
reconstructions.
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The visual presentation of these programs and films is, he claims, not
designed to be ontologically troubling for the viewer. These are not reflexive
documentaries, asking the viewer to ponder the ability of documentary to teach us
anything about the world.
It is, perhaps, more helpful to think of Walking with Dinosaurs and Life After
People as hypothetical documentaries, rather than conditional documentaries asking us to
reflect on their temporal and epistemological status. Both these examples aim to present
an epistemologically cohesive whole that, rather than troubling us with its ontology,
relies on a mimicking of indexical imagery to reassure us of its validity. Indeed, as Wolf
has observed in talking about a television series about Native American history that
reconstructed the dead city of Tenochtitlan, “it is difficult to tell from the imagery alone
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where historical evidence ends and speculation begins.”
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Walking with Dinosaurs and
Life After People rely on the conflation of hard evidence and speculation in their covert
assertion of the equal status of witnessed and hypothesized knowledge and of indexical
and iconic material.
Typically, the type of conditional and hypothetical documentaries discussed by
Ward and Lebow depend on re-enactment. Films and television programs such as Small
Pox 2002: The Silent Weapon (2003), The Death of a President (2004), and The Day
Britain Stopped (2003) are presenting events as they may still or could have occurred, so
by definition there is no footage of the events filmed as they happened. Brian Winston
has argued that reconstruction is often unfairly maligned as an untruthful aspect of
documentary filmmaking. This, he suggests, has arisen from the “widespread popularity”
of dramadocumentaries, which has “occasioned a tendency to reclassify all …
documentaries involving reconstruction as not being documentaries at all.”
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Reconstruction in documentary, Winston tells us, has put the form on unstable
epistemological ground.
But, Winston, cautions us that there is nothing inherently untruthful about acting
and reconstruction in documentary and reminds us of Richard Barsam’s 1948 definition
of documentary as “all methods of recording … either by factual shooting or by sincere
and justifiable reconstruction.”
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Winston suggests thinking of a continuum of
reconstruction that ranges from the total non-intervention of closed-circuit television and
surveillance cameras to the total manipulation of acting in a fictional film. Anything that
is not at this very far end of the fictional range can be “considered legitimate for
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documentary practice.”
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This means, for Winston, enactment of the typical, possible and
even untypical becomes legitimate documentary fodder.
In terms of considering the viability of animation and computer-generated
imagery as a documentary tool one could compare it to re-enactment. In a similar way to
documentaries that use reconstruction, Life After People presents the future in a way that
says ‘this is what things probably would look like if you were here to eyewitness them.’
But neither reconstruction nor computer animation has an indexical bond to the events
being portrayed. All that a reconstruction documentary is evidence of is that an actor or
group of actors (social or professional) stood in front of the camera at the moment of
filming. In the case of the animation of future or prehistoric life, the indexical bond is
even more in absentia. Much of what we see onscreen in Life After People and Walking
with Dinosaurs is fabricated using advanced computer programming, creating images
whose only source is the binary code that makes up the pixels of the image. The validity
comes, much like in re-enactment documentaries, in part because of its resemblance to a
believable reality. Both types of documentary rely, in part, on the audience affording the
icon the epistemological weight and evidential status of the index.

Animated Re-enactment in Chicago 10
So far I have considered two examples of photorealistic animated documentary that
visually and epistemologically mimic the indexical through re-enactment of the
unwitnessed past and pre-enactment of the unwitnessable future. In this section I will
look at the film Chicago 10, which uses animation to reconstruct witnessed historical
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events for which no filmed record exists. The film combines animation, archival footage
and photographs to detail the run up to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and
the subsequent trial the following year of members of the anti-war movement, including
Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale, who were accused of inciting riots during the
convention.
The film had no shortage of footage for most of the events leading up to the trial,
such as the anti-war protesters gathering for the ‘festival of life’ in Lincoln Park and the
convention itself, as much of this was covered on national and local news. Even the
“secret meeting” that took place between anti-war groups such as the National
Mobilization against the War (MOBE) and the newly-formed Yippies in northern Illinois
in early 1968 to discuss their plans for protests around the convention was captured on
film. However, the trial itself was not filmed, as cameras were not allowed in the
courtroom, and these and other key scenes for which no filmed record exists were
reconstructed using animation. These reconstructions of the trial were “adapted from”
the 23,000-page court transcript.
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The film also reconstructs from aural evidence, such
as the speeches given by the defendants at various public speaking engagements
undertaken at the time of the trial and the aired phone calls between Abbie Hoffman and
Bob Fass at New York City’s WBAI Radio.

The film was directed by Brett Morgen, who has a track record of creating
documentary out of limited, or limiting, original material. His 2002 film The Kid Stays in
the Picture (co-directed with Nanette Burstein), about the rise and fall of legendary
Hollywood producer Robert Evans, brought Evans’ large photo archive to life through
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then cutting-edge computer software. While Evans’ life had been extensively
photographed, there was little filmed record of the events Evans so colorfully describes
on the film’s soundtrack. Morgen and Burstein used image manipulation program
Photoshop to split the images into layers and then animated them by adding zooms, pans
and tracking ‘shots’ in After Effects. The processes add depth and movement to the
images, creating moving pictures out of static ones.
Almost all of the animation in Chicago 10 was created using the motion capture
technique. Better known through its use in mainstream, high budget feature films such as
The Polar Express (2004) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, and 2003) this
device is the technological descendent of the Rotoscope, which was invented by Max
Fleischer in 1917. The Rotoscope enabled the animator to trace over live-action footage
in order to create lifelike movement of animated characters. Motion capture is similarly
about verisimilitude in movement and character design. It is the “technology that enables
the process of translating a live performance into a digital performance” through sensors
that capture key points of an actor’s movement and the mapping of this data onto a three-
dimensional digital character.
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The final animation can take any form and the
verisimilitude of movement does not necessarily dictate a photorealistic style. Whereas
films like The Polar Express attempt to create characters that are indiscernible from
humans, Chicago 10’s animation is more stylized (see figure 2.4). The visual references
for the documentary come more from comic books and graphic novels than from reality
and film.
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Chicago 10’s relationship to the indexical is not as clear as the cut-and-dried
mimicking of indexical media we see in Walking with Dinosaurs and Life After People.
The characters in Chicago 10 look human; in fact they closely resemble their human
counterparts. There would, for example, be no mistaking Abbie Hoffman for Judge
Julius Hoffman or defense attorney Leonard Weinglass as each is distinctly recognizable.
However, there would also be no mistaking the animated image for film as the animation
looks nothing like indexical imagery. It is bright and colorful and characters and objects
are clearly outlined. Despite being created using motion capture, the characters’
movement is sometimes blocky and jerky. Even more distracting is that their lip
movement is rarely in synch with the dialogue. In short, it does not look like film and,
unlike the digital imagery in science documentaries that Anneke M. Metz frets about,
could in no way be confused for it.

Figure 2.4: Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2007)
134

Chicago 10 does contain some moments of visual verisimilitude that nod towards
photorealism. When Abbie Hoffman talks to Bob Fass from a call box on a snowy
Chicago night, the condensation on the glass, through which we see Hoffman on the
phone, is strikingly realistic. The droplets of water draw our attention because their
photorealism is in stark contrast to the cartoony look of the rest of the animated scene. In
general, however, the film is not attempting to fake indexicality like Walking with
Dinosaurs and Life After People. It uses other devices to create an indexical affect that,
in turn, endorse the animation as a viable means of reconstructing unfilmed events.
Perhaps the most overt element that helps to frame the animation as documentary
is the dialogue track. The audience’s attention is drawn to the factual basis of the
courtroom scenes before the film has even begun, with the introductory title card telling
us the courtroom scenes are based on transcripts. Furthermore, there is an attempt to oral
verisimilitude through the casting of these roles. Hank Azaria, a skilled voice mimic,
plays both Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg. Hoffman in particular had a distinctive
Boston accent, one that Azaria convincingly imitates. Morgen has discussed how Roy
Scheider took particular care to match the inflections and ticks of the presiding Judge.
Such oral mimicry became possible when the filmmakers uncovered a sound recording of
the trial, evidence not previously known to exist.
86

In a move that does create an indexical link between the original trial and its
recreation, Morgen recruits defense attorney Leonard Weinglass to re-voice his original
words. Morgen has mentioned that he was particularly pleased when he heard that
Weinglass still sounded much as he did in 1969.
87
The film also utilizes oral
135
documentary material from the time. The animations of the conversations between Abbie
Hoffman and Bob Fass accompany original recordings of those radio shows. These
recordings are seamlessly knitted into the film, with no indication of a difference between
this audio and what we hear during the trial. This is partly facilitated by Azaria’s
convincing impression of Hoffman. The smooth elision of original recording and
reconstruction works to validate the latter.
A similar connection is made visually between the animation and the archive
material used in the film. Frequently, the clothing on an animated embodiment of a
character will match what they wore in a scene shown in archival footage, even if those
two scenes are not necessarily contemporaneous. We cut, for example, from a courtroom
scene in which Jerry Rubin wears a distinctive yellow and red striped shirt to archival
footage of a press conference of him wearing the same shirt. This match on clothing
happens throughout the film and it makes a mental connection between the animated
reconstructions and the ‘genuine’ documentary news footage from the time. Other
devices are used to subtly back up the animation. After the animation of Allen Ginsberg
giving testimony, in which he recites his poem about a wet dream, we cut to original
footage of a news anchor describing that event. This second scene is narratively
unnecessary, as it offers no more information than we have already gained in the
animated sequence. However, it corroborates both the previous scene and, by
association, all of the animated reconstructions.
Another sequence in the film goes further than these editing and structural
techniques by compositing live action and animation. On day four of the convention
136
leaders of the anti-war movement, including Dave Dellinger and Jerry Rubin, addressed
the gathered crowds from the band shell in Lincoln Park, prior to the fateful march to
downtown. This is depicted through a composite of animation and live action as Rubin
and Dellinger are animated over the filmed footage of the surroundings and the crowds.
The animation is blended with the live action to the extent that it matches the grainy
quality and washed-out color of the original material. Unlike the courtroom scenes, these
moments of animation are more photorealistic and at times it is hard to discern the
animation from the blurry live action footage in which it is placed.
The piggy-backing of the animation onto live action in Chicago 10 does two
things. As previously mentioned, it works to establish the animated sequences as sincere
reconstructions. It also works to legitimate questionable moments in the animated
portion of the story. Even though the animation of the court scenes, for example, is based
on transcripts there is still a certain amount of hypothesizing that went into their
reconstruction. For example, any parts of the reconstruction that would not have been
recorded in the transcript must have been guessed at or extrapolated, such as the physical
gestures of the defendants. One wonders, for example, if Jerry Rubin really did fly a
paper airplane across the courtroom as a witness gave testimony against him. Similarly,
we could question whether the party scene, where Abbie and Jerry discuss ideas for
protesting the convention and form the Yippie group, is based on the same sort of oral or
written evidence as the trial. Or is this just an imagining of an event that the filmmakers
knew to have happened?
137
These extrapolated or hypothesized moments are elided by the overall framing of
the animation, discussed above, as a genuine documentary tool of sincere reconstruction.
The film even goes so far as to reposition the relative epistemological validity of
animation and live action in one courtroom scene. When undercover police officer
Robert Pierson gives evidence about working as Rubin’s bodyguard, he recalls an
incident in Lincoln Park. As he retells the events the animation simulates a camera
pushing tight into his face and zooming around the side of his head. As we pass his left
ear the animation segues into live action black and white footage of the Park. In this
way, the animation and live action switch their traditional roles. As will be discussed in
later chapters, animation has often been used to ‘get inside’ someone’s head and to show
their point of view. In this instance, though, it is through live action that Robert Pierson’s
memory is conveyed.
All these devices add up to give the animation the same epistemological status as
the ‘genuine’ documentary material. The framing of the animation within a documentary
context of unproblematic indexical imagery and the slippage between the animation and
the original footage works to justify its inclusion as a tool to retell the events surrounding
the convention and trial. The animation is, the film implies, showing us things as they
happened and is offering us the same knowledge that we would have gained had we been
eyewitness to the events as they occurred.
It is, however, important to acknowledge the effect that the style of animation has
on our response to the information it conveys. Brett Morgen has commented that he was
motivated to use animation to overcome the lack of filmed material after reading a quote
138
from Jerry Rubin “where he described the trial as a ‘cartoon show.’”
88
The animation,
therefore, has a symbolic as well as an iconic relevance. We could surmise that Morgen
chose a comic-book style of animation to reflect one of the themes of his film – that the
trial was a joke and made a mockery of the American justice system. The film, however,
favors iconicity over symbolism, with its constant affirmations of animation’s viability as
a tool of reconstruction of witnessed events.
I argued above, following Craig Hight, that the hypothetical documentaries
Walking with Dinosaurs and Life After People are not asking us to reflect on their
ontological status. They aim to present a cohesive epistemological whole that relies on
the convincing mimicry of indexical imagery to reassure us of the validity of the
information being conveyed. The way the material is packaged to construct evidence
relies in part on textual and extratextual framing. Moreover, it also relies on our
acceptance of photorealistic iconic imagery as having a similar epistemological weight as
indexical images. This creates an is-it-isn’t-it real tension even as we accept these
images as evidence of witnessable events that could have, or could still, occur.
Any is-it-isn’t-it tension in Chicago 10 is not derived from the animated images
per se, as much as from their foundation (or not) on events that actually happened. The
ontological hybridity, therefore, of Chicago 10 is more overt than in Walking with
Dinosaurs and Life After People. The animation is foregrounded as such and there is no
potential to mistake it for indexical media. However, just as Walking with Dinosaurs and
Life After People elide their ontological complexity, Chicago 10 skims over questions of
its images’ epistemological status. The text does not invite us to question whether these
139
events happened.
89
Rather, it uses the animation to question the events themselves. In
particular, it is questioning the validity of the trial, which the film clearly considers an
absurd travesty of justice.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have explored three documentaries that use animation to reconstruct
supposed, actual and predicted events. These three texts all present knowledge that could
be considered “conventional” of the documentary. That is, knowledge of observable
events that occur in the historical world of lived experience. These examples are not,
unlike many of the films I will discuss in the following chapters, marking a shift in the
type of knowledge we gain from a documentary. The things we learn about through these
films is the stuff of exteriority – what dinosaurs looked like, futuristic landscapes, the
gestures made by defendants in a bogus trial. The information being presented may be
speculated knowledge, but it is still the knowable-through-observation knowledge of
conventional documentaries. In some cases, the speculation has more factual grounding
than others. Much of Chicago 10 is based on events as they occurred. Much of what is
presented in Life After People is based on already witnessed events (such as the fate of
the Ukrainian town of Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster). Walking with Dinosaurs is
perhaps the most speculative of the three. Much of the information presented in this
series is extrapolated from the observed behavior of contemporary reptiles and mammals.
However, while they could display a great deal of similarity to dinosaur behavior, they
could also hypothetically behave and look very unlike their prehistoric ancestors.
140
Interestingly, it is the most photorealistic of the three examples that is also the
most hypothetical. This suggests a nuanced relationship between animation, “realism,”
and hypothesis. Critics were troubled by much of the guesswork in Walking with
Dinosaurs, and I suggested above that this was due to it being presented orally as
unquestionable fact and also that it resembled factual media (in the form of natural
history documentaries). We could imagine that there is less of a problem with the
guesswork in Life After People because it is foregrounded as hypothesis. The word
‘probably’ crops up repeatedly in the program and in the media surrounding it, such as
the program websites hosted by the History Channel and Channel 4. Less problematic
still, apparently, is Chicago 10, even though it is equally unclear in this film where the
guesswork starts and fact ends (one of the criticisms leveled against Walking with
Dinosaurs).
What makes Chicago 10 less problematic, I would suggest, is that the animation
does not look real; it does not mimic indexicality. In making up for the absence of filmed
material animation becomes an excess that has to be negotiated when weighing up the
epistemological value of the text. The animation is both a means to an end and a means
in itself. It serves to substitute for filmed evidence. It also has a value in its own right,
beyond its substitutive ability. This is most clearly illustrated by Chicago 10, where the
style of animation begins to mean something in itself, through animation’s symbolic
capacity to evoke concepts and themes. This is a topic that will be explored further in the
following two chapters.
141
What is in absentia in the animated portions of all three examples is an indexical
link between the iconic imagery and reality. This animation may look like reality, at
times uncannily so, but it does not have the existential link that film theorists argue gives
documentary its epistemological, evidential weight. The critics’ anxiety over the
knowledge-claims of Walking with Dinosaurs have something in common with the
criticisms of photorealistic digital animation in feature films such as The Polar Express.
Criticisms of the latter are based in the problem of the uncanny valley, that a character
that looks almost-but-not-quite human draws attention to its non-human characteristics
(such as the ‘dead’ eyes in Polar Express). This emphasizing of the non-human traits of
human-looking characters is, it is argued, psychologically unsettling for the viewer.
90

The complaints about Walking with Dinosaurs create the epistemological equivalent of
the uncanny valley and are rooted in the trickery being played on us by the too-realness
of the animated images.
I am not, however, suggesting that the examples discussed in this chapter raise
the type of postmodern quandary articulated by Bill Nichols in discussing films that blur
the boundary between fact and fiction. I am not questioning what these examples take as
their referent, or if there is “any ‘there’ there, beyond the frame.”
91
Walking with
Dinosaurs, Life After People and Chicago 10 make no odds about their referents. It just
so happens that their referents are events for which there exists no filmed record and are,
as such, best signified through animation, rather than live action.
It does seem, however, that the use of animation in documentary has reintroduced
the confusion of realism that Bazin argues was eradicated by film and photography. We
142
were confused, he claims, by the pseudorealism of art, a deception aimed at fooling the
eye and the mind. Once again, it seems, we can be fooled, if not visually then mentally,
by pseudorealism, except now it is created digitally, rather than by the paintbrush. Even
if we don’t “venerate” iconic objects that mimic the look and affect of the indexical, as
Dudley Andrew says we venerate shrouds and fingerprints, we do perhaps still take the
iconic as evidence of witnessable events. This is illustrated by the use of animated
reconstructions of crimes as evidence in courtrooms.
92

The idea that that documentary evidence is more to do with iconicity than
indexicality is one suggested to us by Bazin. In “The Ontology of the Photographic
Image” he, by inference, equates documentary value with resemblance. By saying “no
matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value
the image may be…” he implies that if the signifier does not resemble its referent then it
lacks documentary value.
93
This complicates the epistemological foundation of
documentary and questions the assumption that it has special status as evidence through
an indexical link with reality.
If evidence is about resemblance, then it follows that animation is as viable an
option for representation of that evidence as is film. Nichols and Rosen remind us that
our acceptance of documentary evidence as such is as much to do with how the images
are framed and our extratextual knowledge of their origin as their indexicality.
Indexicality, it would seem, is a mental impression as much as it is an existential trace.
Animation is equally able to construct an indexical affect, if we understand indexical
affect to be, as discussed by Bazin, film’s innate ability to satisfy our desire for realism.
143
Realism is, Bazin suggests, about our desire to stop the passage of time. This desire to
embalm the present so we can view it in the future is, we could argue, being ultimately
satisfied by the examples under consideration here. Walking with Dinosaurs and Life
After People are bringing back a past we never experienced and allowing us to see a
future that is predicated on our absence. This temporal play is responding to the absence
of human presence and animation is extending film’s potential to conquer time. As such,
animation used in this way claims its right as the successor to photographic media’s reign
of realism.
144
Chapter II Endnotes

1
I am grateful to Bill Nichols for bringing this series to my attention.

2
Galt, “‘It’s so cold in Alaska’: Evoking Exploration Between Bazin and The Forbidden Quest,”
63.

3
Sontag, On Photography, 5.

4
Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 4th ed., 86.

5
Nichols, Representing Reality, 150.

6
Roscoe and Hight, Faking It, 6.

7
Winston, Claiming the Real, 206.

8
Wollen, Signs and Meanings, 86.

9
Ibid.

10
Ibid., 83.

11
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 12.

12
Ibid.

13
Ibid., 13-14. Emphasis in original.

14
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 81.

15
Ibid., 4.

16
Rosen, Change Mummified, 18.

17
Barthes, 88.

18
Bazin, 14.

19
Wollen, 92.

20
Rosen, 18-19.

21
Pierce, “Sign,” in Peirce on Signs, 239-40.

22
Barthes, 88.

145

23
Andrew, “Foreword” to Bazin, What Is Cinema? xvi.

24
Bazin, 9.

25
Bazin, “ The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 29.

26
Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 46.

27
Nichols, Representing Reality, 14.

28
Ibid., 30.

29
Ibid., 178.

30
Ibid., 117.

31
Photorealism in the tradition of making a painting that looks like a photograph. This has been
adopted into computer animation with the pursuit in animation of an image that resembles the
look of film. Recent examples include Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), Polar Express
(2004) and Beowulf (2007).

32
Barsam, Nonfiction Film, 1.

33
Galt, 56.

34
Nichols, 150.

35
Ibid., 153.

36
Rosen, 261.

37
Hight, “Primetime Digital Documentary Animation: The Photographic and Graphic Within
Play,” 28.

38
And, more recently, a successful stage show.

39
In particular, Scott and White note the sequence early on in Episode 3 where the sea-dwelling
liopleurodon rises out of the ocean and snatches an unsuspecting dinosaur from the shore is
reminiscent of the famous moment in Attenborough’s 1990 series The Trials of Life in which a
killer whale emerges from the water to prey on a basking seal. Similarly, the much-loved
Meerkats United (1993) series is honoured in the scenes that show the social organisation of the
diminutive Leaellynasaura in Episode 5. Scott and White, “Unnatural History? Deconstructing
the Walking with Dinosaurs Phenomenon,” 329 n.7.

40
Walking with Dinosaurs, DVD booklet (1999, London: BBC Worldwide, 2004).

146

41
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/tv_radio/wwdinosaurs/ (accessed Oct 9 2008).

42
Walking with Dinosaurs, DVD booklet.

43
Walking with Dinosaurs, DVD booklet.

44
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/tv_radio/wwdinosaurs/ (accessed October 9 2008);
Scott & White, 316.

45
University of Bristol Earth Sciences website, http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/dinosaur/
walking.html, (accessed October 9 2008). Furthermore, the first episode was the most-watched
programme of any type in the UK the week it premiered, clocking in above the usual top-dogs
Eastenders and Coronation Street (UK’s two longest-running evening soap operas). See
Broadcaster’s Audience Research Board website, http://www.barb.co.uk/viewingsummary/
weekreports.cfm?report=weeklyterrestrial&RequestTimeout=500 (accessed October 9 2008).

46
Banks-Smith, “Roar of Approval: Last night’s TV.”

47
Hanks, “Television Review.”

48
Walking with Dinosaurs, DVD booklet.

49
Tim Haines, quoted in Walking with Dinosaurs, DVD booklet.

50
Banks-Smith.

51
Joseph, “How the Dinosaurs Lived, but we could Be Wrong.”

52
Hanks.

53
Barrett, “A Bone to Pick.”

54
Midgley, “BBC Accused Over Dinosaur Series;” Barrett.

55
Barrett.

56
McKie, “Who Put the Pee in the Postosuchus?”

57
Metz, “A Fantasy Made Real: The Evolution of the Subjunctive Documentary on U.S. Cable
Science Channels,” 336.

58
O’Pray, “The Animated Film,” 435.

59
For example, the giant herbivore Sauropod class of dinosaurs had once been thought to be able
to bend their long necks to graze from treetops, an impression bolstered by how these dinosaurs
were represented in Jurassic Park. However, this inaccuracy is corrected in Episode 2 (A Time of

147

Titans), which shows that the immobile stiff neck of the Diplodocus would have meant it foraged
exclusively from the foliage on forest floors.

60
Scott and White, 321.

61
Rosen, 20.

62
Rosen, 239.

63
Interestingly, Branagh’s tone of voice is far less authoritative and imposing in the Making of
episode, and much more conversational and light. This only adds to the sense that we are being
given a special insight into the scientific validity of the series.

64
Moran, “A Bone of Contention,” 260. Emphasis in original.

65
Ibid., 261.

66
Mark J. P. Wolf has pointed out that these earlier devices of optical assistance were also
received with initial scepticism and distrust. See “Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging
and Simulation,” 275.

67
Moran, 265.

68
Nichols, Representing Reality, 112.

69
Life After People (Channel 4, UK, 2008).

70
In fact, much of the animation in Life After People is not realistic in that it looks very faked and
computer generated, which could explain its relative lack of critical success and popularity with
television audiences.

71
Including civil engineers, astrophysicists, biologists, urban ecologists, and the facilities
manager of the Hoover Dam.

72
Nichols, Representing Reality, 98; Ward, “The Future of Documentary? ‘Conditional Tense’
Documentary and the Historical Record.”

73
Ward, 274.

74
Ibid., 272.

75
Ibid., 279.

76
Ibid,. 274.

77
Lebow, “Pre-Enactment in the Hypothetical Documentary.”

148

78
Ward, 272.

79
Hight, 17.

80
Wolf, 282.

81
Winston, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, 25.

82
Ibid., 106.

83
Ibid.

84
As the audience is informed by a title card at the beginning of the film.

85
Menache, Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games, 1.

86
Brett Morgen, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, WHYY, February 27, 2008.

87
Ibid.

88
River Road Entertainment and Participant Productions, Chicago 10 Press notes, 12.

89
It is interesting to consider whether this would still be the case had the film not presented the
opening title informing the audience that the courtroom animation was based on the transcripts
from the trial. The relationship between image, text and labelling is discussed in the next chapter.
90
See chapter three for further discussion of the uncanny in animation.

91
Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, xi.

92
Sjöberg, “Viewing the Absent: Forensic Animation Film and the UnPhotographable.” Also,
Wolf.

93
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1. My emphasis.
149
CHAPTER III
ABSENT BODIES/ PRESENT VOICES: THE ANIMATED INTERVIEW

Introduction
Documentary and testimony are so intertwined that we rarely question the inclusion of
the latter in the former, or even the substitution of the former for the latter. In The Politics
of Documentary Michael Chanan recalls being summoned to a 1978 trial to present
footage shot at an anti-Fascist rally. The layout of the courtroom demanded the projector
be setup in the witness box in order that everyone could see the image.
1
This ironic
anecdote demonstrates how documentary footage can unquestioningly be taken as
evidence – in this case the footage speaking for itself and giving testimony from the
witness stand.
Talking head interviews have become the primary way to facilitate documentary
subjects’ testimony. This documentary trope, which is now so familiar, was first
explored by Grierson’s cohort of young filmmakers in Britain in the 1930s. The
successful inclusion of interviews in Housing Problems cemented this device as a tool of
documentary production. Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane have pointed out that the
use of direct interviews was experimental at the time.
2
Arthur Elton had previously
explored the journalistic approach of asking documentary subjects to speak their
interview responses directly to the camera in Workers and Jobs (1935), but it was
Housing Problems that “more clearly defined the potential values of the device.”
3
The
words of the slum-dwellers, who describe their poor living conditions and anticipate the
prospect of better, healthier lives in the new mass housing, back up the film’s argument
150
of slum clearance in favor of modern, high-rise housing estates (these ones fuelled by the
Gas Board, who sponsored the film). The Griersonians continued to use interviews in
their films and established testimony and first-person oral accounts as an accepted, even
integral part of the documentary. This is true to the extent that, as Chris Holmlund and
Cynthia Fuchs have pointed out, the interview is now so integrated into documentary that
it is one of its recognizable markers.
4

Chapter Two suggested that documentary’s status as evidence is ensconced in
theories of the ontology of film and its indexicality. The association of documentary with
and as evidence is further solidified by the form’s inclusion of the interview as one of its
main components. To testify to something, and to give testimony, is synonymous with
bearing witness, giving proof and asserting and affirming the truth.
5
Brian Winston has
noted, “the law is the source of a critical documentary technique – the interview.”
6

According to Winston, once the interview was accepted and naturalized as legitimate
legal procedure it was “borrowed for journalism and … then borrowed again for radio
and the cinema.”
7
The legal origin of this now integral part of documentary results in the
documentary interview carrying the evidential weight of a legal testimony. Just as
testimony is evidence in a court of law, so it becomes evidence in a radio or screen
documentary. In the same way the interview is a legitimate source of the truth in a legal
trial, it becomes a marker of truth, proof and authenticity in a documentary.
The legal status of interviews and testimony is based in a general commonsense
view regarding the epistemology of testimony. Instinctively, we believe the words of
others unless we have a just reason to doubt them.
8
Thus, if a speaker seems reliable and
151
sane and if their testimony sounds likely and fits in with the knowledge we already have
of the world and the specific situation, we have no reason to doubt what we hear. It
would seem that hearing, as well as seeing, is believing. This instinct transfers to
testimony and interviews in documentary film, where our “default function” is to “trust
those who speak to the camera unless given a reason to do otherwise.”
9

Our tendency to trust those who testify in a documentary film is something that
can be capitalized on by filmmakers. Predominantly, this “function” is relied on in the
assumption that the audience will take a documentary speaker at her word. The speaker’s
credibility is often enhanced, and thus our default tendency further encouraged, through
the “iconic authentication” of background shots such as shelves of relevant books and
other “authenticating locations.”
10
However, our trust can also be drawn on for ironic,
humorous or reflexive purposes. Mitchell Block exploits the audience’s belief of a young
woman’s revelation of a rape in No Lies (1973) to comment on the manipulative
possibilities of a format (documentary) and aesthetic (observational filming) we
instinctively have faith in. The pact of honesty and trust between filmmaker, participant
and viewer is satirized through the earnest, ridiculous interviews with a fake heavy metal
band in This is Spinal Tap (1984).
If No Lies and This is Spinal Tap exploit our trust in interviewees to make a point
about the documentary form, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1985) calls into question
the veracity of documentary testimony itself. Morris’s presentation of the events
surrounding the murder of a Dallas policeman and subsequent arrest and conviction of
Randall Adams subtly raises, and then repeatedly reinforces, the question of to what
152
extent we can trust the words of those who speak in the film. The film comprises
interviews with people involved in the case, including Adams’ accuser who is later
revealed to be the real perpetrator of the crime. These interviews are intercut with a
repeated, highly stylized reconstruction of the shooting, a dramatization that alters with
the differing testimonies regarding the events. Linda Williams has pointed out that the
eschewing of a vérité, or observational, style in these re-enactments results in a refusal of
“any of them as an image of what actually happened.”
11
The changing reconstruction
illustrates the lack of one coherent recounting of the past and calls into question the
credibility of the interviewees’ testimony. Morris’s film shows us how the creative
treatment of actuality (in this instance, the repeated re-enactment of the crime in
question) can enhance and question one of documentary’s foundational functions – that
of trusting an interviewee.
The Thin Blue Line, however, goes further than questioning how reliable these
witnesses and participants are. Its layering of testimony and re-enactment denies any
easy access to the truth of a past from the present moment of the film’s production and its
subsequent, multiple moments of viewing. The truth, it suggests, it not something that is
simply ‘out there’ to be accessed in any easy way. Morris’s excavation depends on more
than film’s indexical relationship with reality and he creatively assembles an “anti-vérité
documentary” that “overturns the commitment to realistically ‘record life as it is’ in favor
of a deeper investigation of how it became as it is.”
12
Instead, we are shown the
documentary potential of the symbolic and the suggestive.
153
Whereas the films I discussed in chapter two underscore the conventional
documentary’s association with knowledge that is empirical and that can be gained
through observation of iconic images, the films I discuss in this chapter suggest an
epistemological shift. The Thin Blue Line engages with epistemology because it leads us
to question, doubt even, our instinctive trust of documentary speakers – figures who we
are accustomed to taking at their word. The animated documentaries I will discuss over
the following pages engage with epistemology because they lead us to question not only
how we gain knowledge from interview documentaries, but also what type of knowledge
is being offered in these kinds of films. The films are not questioning the reliability of the
speakers, but causing us to ask how knowledge is transferred and evidence established
through documentary testimony, something we might have once taken for granted. Just
as Morris suggests to his audience, through the use of expressive re-enactments and
editing, that there may be more to the story than what we hear from the participants’
testimonies, these animated documentaries suggest there is epistemologically more to
documentary interviews than the transference of information through a first-person
account of events. In so doing, these animated documentaries show how animation’s
malleable visual field and capacity for visual metaphor can be used to enhance and
expand the epistemological range of documentary.
Bill Nichols has made a direct connection between testimony and embodied
knowledge. He claims we learn as much from what we see as from what we hear in
interview documentaries when he says, “it is not simply the knowledge possessed by
witnesses and experts that needs to be conveyed through their speech, but also the
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unspoken knowledge that needs to be conveyed by the body itself.”
13
Similarly, Michael
Renov discusses the power of the testimony in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) as
coming from the body of the interviewee: “the kernel of trauma, buried and of the Real,
erupts less as language, more as signs of bodily distress – grimacing, tears, the cessation
of activity.”
14
What Renov and Nichols draw our attention to is that the epistemology of
testimony, at least in the case of audiovisual documentary, is not only entailed in the
words of the speaker. Rather, it is how these words are delivered and, more specifically,
the actions of the body and the gestures of human behavior that betray the truth of the
testimony.
This relationship between testimony, epistemology and the body makes the
suggested unreliability of spoken testimony in The Thin Blue Line even more complex as
the epistemological doubt is belied by Morris’s use of the Interrotron. This device,
designed by Morris, projects his own image under the camera lens, like an autocue, so
that interviewees answering his questions address themselves directly to the camera, and
thus to the viewer.
15
That the documentary subjects are looking us directly in the eye
while we hear their spoken account enhances the assumption of truth that comes with
documentary testimony. The undercutting of this assumption in The Thin Blue Line
becomes even more profound as a result.
If the body is so central to how we gain knowledge from interview-based
documentaries and if the “documentary film insists on the presence of the body,”
16
what
happens when the body is no longer present? What happens when the human body is
replaced with an animated one, one that has no tangible physical presence? This chapter
155
will examine three groups of films that substitute animated bodies for physical bodies in
interview-based documentaries. These films can be thought of as containing animation
that functions in a substitutive way, standing in for absent live-action. But, unlike the
films discussed in the previous chapter, these examples pay less attention to mimicking
the look (and attendant epistemological weight) of live-action footage. These films
substitute for live-action with less concern for photo-realism and more exploration of the
symbolic and expressive potential of animation.
The first section of this chapter looks at the non-fiction work of Bob Sabiston and
Aardman Animation. Both Sabiston and Aardman produce documentary animation with
a particular physical presence – either the body of the original interviewee or an animated
physical figure. Their work offers a perspective on the question of the absent body in
animated documentaries by suggesting epistemological questions regarding the presence
of certain types of animation that bear tangible traces of physical presence. The next
section directly addresses the question of absent bodies through an analysis of three short
animated documentaries that provide animated visuals that accompany audio recordings
of interviews. The final section examines the issue of the voice in interview
documentaries via Dennis Tupicoff’s His Mother’s Voice (1997) and proposes that
animated interview documentaries throw the issue of documentary sound into new relief.

Animated Bodies: Rotoshop and Puppet Non-Fiction Animation
While some animated films deny us any sensorial connection with ‘real,’ living,
solid bodies, there are others that bear a more tangible trace of materiality. This section
156
will address two different styles of animation that have been used in conjunction with
documentary, interview soundtracks. These styles articulate questions regarding
documentary epistemology and embodied knowledge through their direct visual
connection with the physical world. Rotoscoping (and its computer-based descendents)
relies on the presence of the body in the original film or video footage on which the
animated representation is directly based. Puppet animation involves the frame-by-frame
alternation of a manipulable, present and solid object. Animator Bob Sabiston has
developed a computerized version of the Rotoscope – Rotoshop – which he has used to
animate interviews. Aardman Animations are well known for their clay puppet
animations (“claymations”), which are matched with documentary soundtracks.
The Rotoscope was invented by Max Fleischer and patented in 1917. The device
enabled a process of tracing live action footage frame-by-frame and these traced
illustrations would then be filmed to create the final animation.
17
The development of the
process was motivated by the Fleischer Brothers’ desire for greater naturalism in the
movements of their films’ characters, the presumption being that a tracing of human
movement would look more realistic than movement created solely by the animator’s
hand. The Fleischers used the Rotoscope to animate many of the ‘stars’ of their studio,
including Betty Boop and Koko the Clown (whose movement was based on filmed
performances by Max’s brother and fellow animator Dave). Walt Disney, in his pursuit
of his own brand of ‘realism,’ used the device to draw the leading lady in his first feature
film Snow White (1937).
18
With the advent of computer animation, the Rotoscope has
spawned many digital descendants, including the Motion Capture process that was used
157
in Chicago 10 and the software program Rotoshop, developed by Austin-based animator
Bob Sabiston.

Figure 3.1: Project Incognito (Bob Sabiston, 1997)
Sabiston developed Rotoshop in the 1990s and first used it in Project Incognito
(1997), a short film made for an MTV competition. Inspired by Nick Park’s animation of
“real people” in the Creature Comforts (1989 onwards) series, Sabiston wanted to
“capture something [he] liked about people’s personalities.”
19
After filming interviews
with people on the streets of Austin, Sabiston looked for a computer program that
allowed you to trace on top of frames of video footage. When his search proved futile he
developed the software himself. Sabiston has subsequently developed the process
(initially funded by MTV and then independently), which is now far more sophisticated
than the original program that facilitated the simple, black-line-on-white background look
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of the first rotoshopped shorts at MTV (see figure 3.1). The software (and Sabiston) is
perhaps best known for the look of Richard Linklater’s two animated feature films,
Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).
The Rotoshop process is, most basically, a computerized version of the
Rotoscope. Live action footage is shot using digital video cameras and this footage is
then inputted to the computer where it is converted into Quicktime files. The footage can
then be traced over, one frame at a time, via Wacom graphics pads and pens using the
Rotoshop software. The pressure-sensitivity of the pads enables both subtle and dramatic
variations in line and shade.
20
It is the ‘interpolation’ feature, however, that most
differentiates Rotoshop from other computerized rotoscoping programs and which lends
the finished product its distinctive “smooth-yet-undulating” look.
21
Interpolation is
Sabiston’s high-tech answer to the in-betweening process of traditional animation. Both
processes are a means of filling in the movement between key frames of action. In
Rotoshop, the animator can trace an image in one frame and then jump forward several
frames to trace the same object in its new position. The computer then fills in the frames
in between, ‘interpolating’ the movement from the information it has been given.
Rotoshop updates another established device of traditional cel animation in enabling the
separation of planes of the image. This means certain aspects of the image (such as the
background) can be animated and then “fixed in place by the push of a button,” so that
the animator can work on other planes (such as characters in the foreground) relative to
the parts of the image that have already been isolated and ‘fixed.’
22
This is similar to cel
animation where only the moving parts of the image are re-drawn on clear cels that are
159
laid over the static parts of the frame (such as backgrounds and non-moving body parts).
23

Rotoshop’s separation of the image into layers adds depth and dimension to the finished
animation.
In what follows, I will examine Sabiston’s use of the Rotoshop software to create
two animated documentaries – Roadhead (1998) and Snack and Drink (1999). Roadhead
is an animated record of Sabiston’s drive home from New York to Austin. Over the
course of the journey he stops off in various cities and interviews the people he meets.
The fourteen-minute film features color point-of-view images of the view through the
car’s windshield as it drives into each city. The location is indicated with a large dot-
matrix-font label that scrolls on top of the image from right to left. On the soundtrack we
can hear Sabiston chat to his traveling companion (and producer) Tommy Pallotta, as
well as music from the car’s stereo and other diegetic ambient sound. We then see
interviews with various residents before moving onto a new city. The interviews show
the interviewees in black outline on a white background (the same style Sabiston used in
his MTV shorts). These sections were animated by about twelve volunteer animators and
each interviewee was drawn by three or four different people.
24

This division of labor in animating the interviews belies any notion that
rotoshopping somehow negates or lessens the artistic input of the animator, as the hand of
each different creator is clearly apparent. This is demonstrated in the first interview with
“Colleen” (Washington D.C.) when her image shifts from one that is fairly realistic to
one that is far more abstract. The clear outline and contours of her face give way to a
Picasso-esque rendering that fractures her visage into disconnected lines and accentuated
160
features. The process also allows the different animators to individually interpret the
words of the interviewees. When Elton (Athens, Georgia) explains that he’s only met
seven other Eltons and that they were “all pretty old” the body of this young man is
animated as someone far more advanced in years, shrunken in relation to the size of
Elton’s head and balancing its infirmness on a wooden cane. The “mysticism” of a tarot
card reader (New Orleans) is accentuated by placing a turban on his head and giving him
other stereotypical accoutrements of a fortune-teller such as a long curled moustache and
pointed beard. He is dressed in a vest adorned with planets and stars that move around
imaginary orbits as he talks of his philosophy of life.
Roadhead is an illuminating, amusing portrait of America and reveals the
idiosyncrasies of the people Sabiston and Pallotta meet on their journey home.
Sabiston’s next film, Snack and Drink, is similarly revealing in its focus on the “minutiae
and details of everyday communication.”
25
This film is an animation of a short encounter
between Sabiston, Pallotta and Ryan Power, a teenaged boy with autism. Sabiston and
Pallotta accompany Ryan on his routine trip to the 7-Eleven store to buy a Big Gulp drink
and some candy. Once again, the animation is achieved through Rotoshop and this time
the entire film is in color. The palate is mostly bright, solid colors and Sabiston describes
the film as the “first real color short we rotoscoped.”
26
The representation of Ryan
changes constantly throughout the film, varying from more realistic to more interpretive
realizations. At one point his hair is purple, only to shift quickly to a more believable
dark brown. On the walk to the store, the image moves and undulates in the typical
rotoshopped fashion, but also reflecting the nature of the handheld observational footage
161
on which the animation was based. While Ryan fills up his drinks cup the image is more
static, in particular the background does not wave around in the way it did while they
were walking. Ryan concentrates on making his ‘mixed drink’ by dispensing a small
amount of each soft drink in turn until his cup is full. At one point the individual drinks
buttons are animated with arms, hands and eyes as they vie for Ryan’s attention (see
figure 3.2). Paul Ward has described this moment of expressive animation as “an
amusing and strangely touching visual rendering of just how obsessively focused an
autistic person can be.”
27
Sabiston is here using the animation to interpret Ryan Power’s
experience of interacting with the world.
28

Figure 3.2: Snack and Drink (Bob Sabiston, 1999)
Bob Sabiston’s rotoshopped animated documentaries bear a more tangible trace of
their interviewees. Furthermore, the animated bodies in Snack and Drink and Roadhead
162
“[gain] ‘body’ by drawing on (and being drawn on) other bodies that boast more flesh
and substance.”
29
In her discussion of body politics in rotoscoped films, Joanna Bouldin
has pointed out that these films maintain an indexical connection to the real world. The
“reality and materiality of an original body” is transferred to the animation via the filmed
image on to which the animation is traced.
30
This creates a strange viewing experience,
as we are aware of both the realness and unrealness of the final product. This is
heightened in Sabiston’s films by the often surreal and highly expressive nature of the
animation style. There is a tangibility in the animated Ryan, even though he might have
purple hair, be moving through a pulsating world or being waved at by a drinks
dispenser.
There is an “ontological and phenomenological presence of thickness” in
Sabiston’s films that is not present in animated films that construct their animated bodies
from scratch.
31
This presence and thickness works to “conjure the uncanny, supplemental
presence of an absent body” and we sense the ‘real’ Ryan under the undulating animated
layers, even though the original filmed material does not remain in the final version.
32

This sensation is accentuated in a more recent animation by Sabiston, Grasshopper
(2004), an unedited 14-minute interview in which “park-bench philosopher AJ Vadehra
expounds on astrology and more productive avenues of contemplation.”
33
While the style
of Vadehra’s look changes and morphs frequently, as is familiar from Sabiston’s other
animated documentaries, in much of this film there is a greater sense of photorealism (see
figure 3.3) and the rotoshopping more closely resembles that seen in A Scanner Darkly.
34

Often, Vadehra’s features are clearly distinguishable and the shading and fill on his face
163
realistically resemble the shadow and light that would have fallen on him while he sat in
the park that day. This lends a depth and a dimensionality to his image, even in its more
interpretive and expressive moments, that gives his animated body a ‘thickness and
presence.’ It is as if he is lurking just beneath the grey animated image and that, if we
looked closely enough, we might glimpse him there. He is both there and not there, and
Sabiston’s animated documentaries activate a dialectical tension between absence and
presence.

Figure 3.3: Grasshopper (Bob Sabiston, 2004)
While this dichotomy is evidenced in all animated films,
35
it is especially
amplified in animated documentaries, and in interview documentaries in particular.
Nichols tells us that the knowledge we gain in interview documentaries is written on the
body. In Sabiston’s films the body is both present and not present, presenting us with a
164
particular epistemological contradiction regarding what and how we can know from these
films. Is this an embodied knowledge, even if we don’t actually see the real body
concerned? Is the embodied knowledge theorized by Nichols somehow transferred
through the indexical trace that haunts the final Rotoshop version of the film? It should
be of little surprise that digitally rotoscoped films raise these questions regarding reality,
knowledge and the body. Paul Ward has pointed out that the Rotoscope has historically
provoked debates regarding animation’s relationship to reality. The uncannyness of the
rotoscoped image was often found off putting, the ‘realness’ of the movement seeming
out of place in a highly constructed animated world.
36

David Sproxton from Aardman Animations has explained the uncanny oddness of
rotoscoping as resulting from an excess of information: “There was often too much detail
in the movement – necessary for the human form to keep upright or to balance itself or
simply idiosyncratic action.”
37
Sproxton and his colleague Peter Lord represent the
subjects of their animated interviews in stop-motion puppet animation using malleable
Plasticine models.
38
Sproxton and Lord established Aardman Animations in 1976 and
some of their first productions were animated documentaries based on recorded
conversations and interviews. Their Animated Conversations series (produced for the
BBC in 1978) consists of two films that use documentary sound as their basis. Both
Confessions of a Foyer Girl, in which a bored movie theatre concessions stand assistant
chats with her colleague, and Down and Out, set in a homeless hostel, were based on
eavesdropped conversations.
39
This led to a commission from Channel 4 to make five
more shorts that “demonstrated how real people’s voices could be characterised with
165
insight, humour and sensitivity.”
40
The soundtracks of the five Conversation Pieces were
again recorded by openly ‘eavesdropping’ in locations such as workplaces and
community and social centers. Ultimately, this trend in Aardman’s work led to 1989’s
Lip Synch series, one of which was the Creature Comforts short film of Plasticine zoo
animals animated to the musings of interviewees on their living conditions and domestic
amenities, which won the studio its first of many Academy Awards.
41
By this stage,
Sproxton and Lord began more formally interviewing and recording their subjects, often
using a trained radio journalist to do the interviews, which they later cut out of the final
soundtrack.
42

Creature Comforts is an anomaly amongst Aardman’s nonfiction animations in its
use of non-human characters to embody the soundtrack’s voices. From the early
Animated Conversations to the later Lip Synchs one can see the character style and
animation design develop towards the look and tone familiar from Aardman’s recent
Wallace and Gromit TV singles and feature film. The characters in Animated
Conversations and Conversation Pieces bear similarity to the dimensions and features of
the human form. By Lip Synch the animators begin to show a greater interest in
reflecting the tone and subject matter of the shorts in the character design and style of
animation. The reminiscing veteran in the light-hearted War Story has exaggerated
features, with an extremely high forehead and very long nose (in many ways he looks like
an early version of the gadget-loving Wallace who ‘stars’ in later Aardman productions).
In the more serious Going Equipped, in which a man talks about his criminal past, the
166
setting is “plausible and atmospheric”
43
and the character is naturalistic in his look and
movements.
Despite this plausibility and naturalism, Sproxton and Lord were not concerned
with making their animated characters resemble their human counterparts. In fact they
“avoided meeting the people wherever possible taking [their] cues purely from what
[they] heard” on the sound recordings.
44
This decision was motivated in part by a desire
to let the soundtrack dictate the look of the films and also to avoid the visual “noise” that
often results in following live action reference material too slavishly.
45
The result is that
the “body language and the verbal language in the documentary type films seem to match
very well.”
46
This is true even in Creature Comforts, where the animated characters are
animals. The success of this short (and its subsequent sequels) has often been credited to
animator Nick Park’s ability to capture the essence of the speaker’s personality through
the type and behavior of the animal to which its voice is lent. As Paul Wells has noted,
the “voices are skillfully matched to an appropriate animal.”
47
This deferral of image to
sound means the animation never detracts from the authenticity of the soundtrack. The
natural pauses and hesitations of speech are accurately captured, even in the later films
where the subjects had been formally interviewed. The importance of the aural for
Aardman is emphasized at the beginning of each of the Conversation Pieces with their
pre-title shot of a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a visual cue to the origin and authenticity of
the soundtrack.
Suzanne Buchan has observed an important difference between 2D and 3D
(puppet) animation in terms of the extant nature of the profilmic.
48
The former can only
167
be experienced in projection, in the latter the sets and puppets exist and have a concrete
form of their own. Similarly, Laura Ivins-Hulley, in a study of performance in stop-
motion animation, has pointed out that in this type of animation the image of the puppet
is indexical. However, while the image may be indexical, its movement is not. Thus,
“the performance carries a paradoxical indexicality: the puppet tangibly exists outside the
film, but its movement does not.”
49

Puppet animation has been associated with the uncanny feelings evoked by
rotoscoping. The uncanny occurs when we experience something that is both familiar
and unfamiliar at the same time, as is indicated by the original German word unheimlich,
the opposite of heimlich or homely.
50
The uncanny, Freud tells us, “proceeds from
something familiar which has been repressed.”
51
The sensation is inextricably bound up
with our fear of castration because this “infantile” complex that had been repressed is
“once more revived by some impression.”
52
However, the bringing to life of inanimate
objects is also associated with the concepts of the return and doubling, both of which,
Freud tells us, evoke the feeling of the uncanny. The double, which was once “an
assurance of immortality,” has become “the uncanny harbinger of death” because it calls
into question the unity of our subject identity.
53
According to theorists such as Alan
Cholodenko and Robyn Ferrell, who have applied Freud’s psychoanalysis to animation,
animation’s uncanny doubling and repetition appears representative of our own death, our
own primal and potential inanimateness.
54
By bringing to life that which is inanimate,
animation, particularly of 3D objects, evokes “Freud’s notion of the Death Drive – that
drive of animate beings to return to the inanimate state from which they came.”
55

168
Animation can evoke the same psychological response as “feet that dance by
themselves,” and that “have something highly uncanny about them” because “they are
credited … with independent activity.”
56
The bringing to life of inanimate objects causes
the feeling of familiarity yet strangeness that can, according to Freud, be frightening, or
at least deeply unsettling.
I would argue that the psychological concept of the uncanny is perhaps more
applicable to the type of computer generated animation that strives towards photorealism.
Here the uncanny is evoked by characters that look too human, yet not human enough.
Whereas we might identify with an anthropomorphized animated animal because we
focus on the aspects of the character that look human, with animated human characters
that look too real (but not quite real enough) we focus on the features that are not quite
right. So, somewhat paradoxically talking cars are far less troubling to us than very
realistic animated humans. Thus, much has been made of the failure of the Motion
Capture film The Polar Express (2004) being due to the lifeless eyes of the human
characters, which made the characters look ‘creepy.’
57
In 3D puppet and rotoscoped
animation we are not put in the same psychological viewing position of feeling
something is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. In Sabiston and Aardman’s
animated documentaries there is no particular striving for photorealism. Even if
Aardman, in particular, does work for a verisimilitude in gesture and movement, there is
little chance of us confusing the animated object with the real human whose voice it
embodies. Similarly, the look of Sabiston’s Rotoshop bears little resemblance to film,
even if it uses this at its source.
169
Any uncannyness in 3D puppet animation and rotoscoping, I would suggest, is
more to do with what we know than what we feel. These films are epistemologically
unsettling, rather than psychologically unsettling. This is encapsulated by Eisenstein in
the following observation about animation:
We know that they are… drawings, and not living beings
We know that they are… projections of drawings on a screen
We know that they are… ‘miracles’ and tricks of technology, that such
beings don’t really exist
But at the same time:
We sense them as alive
We sense them as moving, as active
We sense them as existing and even thinking!
58

This tension between our knowledge that the animated image is not really ‘there’ and our
response to the image as if it were is emphasized by Ivins-Hulley’s comments on
audience identification in puppet animation. “During the film, our behavior toward the
onscreen action implies that the puppet fully embodies the character with which we
identify. The puppet moves like the pious young maiden, so the puppet is the pious
young maiden.”
59
Whilst Hulley and Eisenstein are both discussing animations of
fictional stories, their comments become even more pertinent when considering animated
documentaries.
In nonfiction animation, our response to the onscreen material is one of constant
negotiation between our knowledge of the documentary status of what we hear and the
constructed and manipulated status of what we see. This negotiation is demanded by all
animated documentary.
60
However, it is heightened in Sabiston’s and Aardman’s films
because of the nebulous materiality of the image. Sabiston’s films are haunted by the
presence of the original bodies. The ticks and inflections of the human behavior of this
170
specific human are still written on the animated image, even if the body itself has long
been deleted from the frame. In Aardman’s animated interviews we are presented with a
material body that is not physically related to the voice we hear, but bears the indexical
traces of its own construction through the imprints of its creators’ fingers and thumbs that
can still be seen on the surface of the clay.
The ambiguous presence of the object or person in rotoshopped and puppet
animation is in counterpoint with the present-ness of the documentary soundtrack. In all
of Sabiston’s animated documentaries and Aardman’s films based on eavesdropped
conversations the documentary subjects speak in the present moment of the recording.
Derrida has drawn our attention to the temporal specificity of testimony:
One must oneself be present, raise one’s hand, speak in the first person
and in the present, and one must do this in order to testify to a present, to
an indivisible moment, that is, at a certain point to a moment assembled at
the tip of an instantaneousness which must resist division… Consequently
for testimony there must be the instant.
61

Yet, despite this, Derrida tells us, the instant is also destroyed by what makes it possible
through the inherent temporality of making a statement. That testimony does not “refer
to anything other than its present moment”
62
rings true with the films examined here.
They seem temporally isolated from any sense of historical context or progress.
63
These
films are an instant, a snapshot of a moment. We learn nothing from Aardman’s Late
Edition of who these people are working in this newspaper office, or what has happened
to them since. We gain little factual information in Sabiston’s films about Ryan Power or
AJ Vadehra or the people he met on his road trip. What we do know of these participants
is of the world specific to them at the moment of the audio recording. The ephemerality
171
of the instant is reinforced by the ephemerality of the animated image and its ambiguous
relationship with reality.
Suzanne Buchan suggests that puppet animation “represents a different ‘world’
for the spectator, something between ‘a world,’ created with the animation technique, and
‘the world,’ in its use of real objects and not representational drawings.”
64
Rotoscoped
and rotoshopped animation occupies this same liminal space between construction and
reality. This blurring of ‘a world’ and ‘the world’ is even more apposite in puppet and
rotoscoped documentaries. Bill Nichols has told us that this is what distinguishes a
documentary from that which is not; that “instead of a world, we are offered access to the
world.”
65
The material blurring of a and the world in puppet and rotoscoped
documentaries is an indication of the epistemological blurring we experience when
viewing them: are we learning about the world or a world when we watch these films?
The soundtrack is a direct link to the world; the animated image is also linked to the
world in both Rotoshop and claymation. However, it also reinterprets this and presents
us visually with a world that comments on the world by capitalizing on things to which
animation lends itself particularly well, such as symbolism and the juxtaposition of image
and sound. While the films discussed above raise certain questions due to the complex
present-absence of the physical body of their interviewees, the examples discussed below
absent the body entirely and, as such, raise a different set of queries regarding
documentary epistemology and the notion of embodied knowledge.

172
Missing Bodies and the Politics of Absence
Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs have pointed out that “to see and be seen is a
matter not only of visual representation but also of social acceptance and political
clout.”
66
There is a politics associated with visibility and, conversely, invisibility. To
have a presence, you must be visible. To have a say, you must be both seen and heard.
Thus, much activist film and video from the 1970s onwards works from this simple
premise – that of raising awareness through raising visibility. Similarly, other politically-
motivated documentary-making, such as the Workshop Movement in the UK in the
1980s, sought to rectify the lack of representation of certain ethnic, racial and social
groups in mainstream media.
67
The suggestion in these types of politically-motivated
filmmaking is that there is power in having a presence in and on audiovisual media.
Furthermore, Jane Gaines has argued that the power of political documentaries to
affect change is carried in the presence of the onscreen body and the response of the body
of the audience member. Following Linda Williams, Gaines posits that political action
by the documentary spectator is spurred by the action of the body in the documentary
itself. This “political mimesis,” in which the audience is prompted to mirror the physical
actions of the documentary participants, occurs when viewing films that make us “want
to kick and yell, films that make [us] want to do something.”
68
Documentary has a
particularly potent political power because “its aesthetic of similarity establishes a
continuity between the world of the screen and the world of the audience.”
69
Gaines
suggestion is, then, that the presence of the onscreen body is an essential ingredient in
motivating the body of the viewer into political (re)action. Moreover, this motivation is
173
bound-up in documentary’s particular representational relationship with the ‘real
world.’
70

Documentary’s role in the political sphere seems intrinsically bound up with the
presence of the body. To enter the debate on identity politics, the embodiment of that
identity must be present on the screen. To motivate political action, there must be a body
onscreen for the body of the viewer to mirror. In this section, I will look at three films
that engage with socio-political issues: asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, sexual
attitudes in old age. These are pertinent issues and all three films ask questions about the
role of certain groups in society, groups that tend not to have a voice or a face in
mainstream media. The films bring issues to light, speak out about injustices and raise
awareness of aspects of society that are usually kept in the dark. In all of the films,
however, the bodies of the documentary subjects are absent.
This absence of the physical body of the interviewees initially seems at odds with
the films’ socio-political undercurrents. Animation masks the ‘real’ people, making them
invisible to us. This very suggestion seems to only exacerbate their lack of voice and
under representation in mainstream media. This notion becomes even more acute in light
of the theories on the importance of the presence of the body in documentary, both in
terms of political efficacy and epistemology. How much power can we say is being
claimed, or afforded to, people who remain invisible to us? Films that replace with
animated characters the bodies of those who are already marginalized in society could be
open to criticism of depoliticizing and disempowering their subjects through the animated
aestheticization of their physical forms.
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It is not entirely apparent, however, that the lack of a physical body precludes a
very real response in the viewer. Jose B. Capino, in an essay on animated pornography,
has commented on the ability of animated bodies to elicit very physical responses. This
demonstrates our “recognition of the corporeality of these bodies (i.e., acknowledging
these bodies as being somewhat like our own) and our willingness to project upon them
similar values that we assign real bodies (i.e., bodies like our own).”
71
With Capino’s
claims in mind, I suggest that the animated documentaries discussed in this section have,
in fact, a doubled political potential. Meaning is evoked in these films through
symbolism and style of presentation. Furthermore, animated bodies also have the power
to evoke a response similar to the one we have to physical cinematic bodies, because
“spectators appraise and evaluate animated bodies in terms of real ones.”
72
The absence
of the physical body does not, I would contend, entail an absence of political meaning
and affect. In fact, the dialectical relationship between the absence of the body and the
excess, in terms of potential for metaphor and interpretation, of the animation has the
capacity to deliver a strong, yet complex political message regarding the roles and
positions we ascribe certain people in society.
When David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn interviewed a young Peruvian
refugee and his family in 1999 there were concerns for their anonymity. The
interviewees’ status as illegal immigrants meant their identity had to be kept secret to
protect them from deportation, a constantly looming threat over their life in Sweden.
This concern, which gives Aronowitsch and Heilborn’s film Hidden (Gömd, 2002) its
name, is flagged up before we even see its animated visuals via an intertitle informing us
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that Giancarlo and his family live in hiding and that the interview was recorded at “an
undisclosed location.” In the short, eight-minute, film, animated by Mats Johansson, the
subjects, which include Giancarlo, his parents and two younger siblings, the two
interviewers and a translator, are animated in a simplistic two-dimensional style. They
are drawn in a childlike fashion, with bold outlines demarcating their bodies and facial
features. The family sits around a large table in an otherwise empty room. Giancarlo’s
younger sibling sits next to him, drawing quietly with a felt-tip pen. His mother stands in
the background, silently rocking a young baby (see figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4: Hidden (Gömd, David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn, 2002)

The film is based on the audio interview recorded by Aronowitsch and Heilborn,
rather than taking any filmed material as its source. As such, Hidden eschews one of the
traditional conventions of visual anonymity in documentary – silhouetting the face/ body
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of the interviewee. Instead, animation becomes a way of preserving the subjects’
anonymity as well as conveying the film’s themes of isolation, loneliness and
desperation. Giancarlo’s physical absence mirrors his lack of legitimate physical
presence in Sweden. This idea is further emphasized in the live-action sequences in the
film. There are two moments when we cut away from the animated scene of the
interview to live-action footage. When Giancarlo speaks of his difficulty in fitting in at
school, we see images of schoolchildren running through a hallway and sitting in a
classroom. Giancarlo is superimposed on these scenes in his animated form, a flimsy
two-dimensional figure in a bustling three-dimensional world. Later, when he describes
the year he spent on his own in Peru before his parents could afford the plane fare for him
to join them in Sweden, he is once again placed in the scene in his animated form. The
contrast between animation and live-action is highlighted when Giancarlo retells the fate
of the other street children who were not as lucky as him in fleeing the local police who
would patrol for truant minors in the city. A giant (live-action) hand grasps the tiny
animated figure of a young child between its thumb and forefinger, the symbolic child
dwarfed in the clutches of authority. The paper-thin child dangles precariously until it is
finally dropped, as Giancarlo’s timid voice tells us how these captured children were sent
to orphanages (see figure 3.5).
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Figure 3.5: Hidden (Gömd, David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn, 2002)

If, as Gaines and Holmund and Fuchs draw our attention to, political power is
dependent on physical presence, then Hidden’s visual mode of address can be read as a
metaphor for the disempowerment of a young, illegal immigrant who has little control
over his destiny.
73
The absent bodies in the film speak to Giancarlo’s plight as an
invisible member of Swedish society. The Australian film It’s Like That (2003), made by
all-female collective the Southern Ladies Animation Group (SLAG), takes up a similar
theme. Here a variety of animation styles are used to depict the young children being
kept in an asylum centre. The film is based on telephone interviews between the young
subjects and journalist Jacqueline Arias. SLAG member Nicole McKinnon first heard
Arias’s interviews in May 2002 on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio
documentary, Un-Australian Behaviour, Part 3: The Children, about children detained
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under the Australian Migration Act of Mandatory Detention of Asylum Seekers.
74
The
group then worked through the six hours of Arias’s original audio material to choose
three of the interviewees, all boys aged eleven and twelve, to focus on in their seven-
minute film.
75
The film’s different animation styles, which include stop-motion puppet
animation, computer 3D animation, flash and hand drawn on paper, reflect the input of
the thirteen animators who worked on the project.
76

Figure 3.6: It's Like That (SLAG, 2003)

The three boys describe the detention center, their families from whom they are
separated, their fears of being deported and the arduous boat journeys that brought them
to Australia. They are primarily represented by three knitted figures of small birds (see
figure 3.6) and also in two-dimensional drawn animation (again, as birds). The
symbolism at play here is clear – the incarcerated children being likened to caged birds.
The innocence of the children is further illustrated by the design of the soft, knitted
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puppets and their reminiscence of simple, old-fashioned stuffed toys. The texture of the
fabric reveals the puppets’ construction and makes them seem fragile and liable to be
unpicked or unraveled.
Like Giancarlo, the boys in the Australian detention center are physically absent
from the film, replaced by puppets or drawings. They are further absented by not being
rendered in human form, giving us no indication of these boys’ actual physical
manifestation (unlike Giancarlo, about whom we might at least presume some knowledge
of his physicality through his animated likeness, which, while lacking any true
verisimilitude, hints at key features such as hair color and relative size). Once again, the
absence of the body of the documentary subject can be seen as representative of their lack
of power or control over their world.
The questions of power, however, and the politics of absence are more complex
and nuanced than initially suggested in these animated representations of members of
groups that are rarely seen in the media. There is a sense of Giancarlo and the boys in the
Australian detention center being ‘given a voice’ through these films, an idea that tallies
with the notion that testimony is a form of speaking out and bringing hidden truths and
secrets to light. Testifying can be thought of as a means of taking epistemological control
of a past event or present situation through revealing its truth. Foucault tells us “Western
societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the
production of truth.”
77
There is a sense of confession in the interview-testimonies in
Hidden and It’s Like That. Giancarlo and the boys in Australia speak openly about their
deepest fears and reveal their vulnerability in the process.
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This sense of revelation and opening up, however, hints at Foucault’s theorization
of the power relationship in confessions. Here, he suggests, it is the inquisitor, not the
speaker, who plays the dominant role. The one asking the questions and receiving the
answers is the one who holds it in his/her power to “judge, punish, forgive, console, and
reconcile.”
78
Rather than being freeing, as they are often interpreted, interviews were
initially “the vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement of forms of
subjugation and schemas of knowledge.”
79
Furthermore, Nichols tells us “interviews are
a form of hierarchical discourse deriving from the unequal distribution of power, as in the
confessional and the interrogation.”
80
Speaking out may not be the empowering act it is
presumed to be. Not only does articulation through interview depend on the uneven
balance of power between interviewer and interviewee, but the result of the process also
gives power to the recipient of the testimony, as it is he/she who decides on how to use
and interpret the words spoken. This reminds us that the telling of these young children’s
stories is being facilitated by others and that the subjects had little (or no) control in the
processes of production, distribution or exhibition. Their visibility and voice is beholden
to those who are in greater control of the media and have the ability, through their
considerably higher social status, to reveal their plight.
Animation has historically used symbolism to make political statements. Eastern
European animation has a long tradition of this expression of the form, precisely because
the authoritarian regimes of the late 1950s onwards prohibited overt artistic expression on
political issues. Animators such as Jiri Trnka and Jan Svankmajer in Czechoslovakia and
the members of the Zagreb School in Yugoslavia typically used symbolic animation to
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allegorically speak out against the political status quo, safe behind the surface meaning of
their films.
81
Hidden and It’s Like That also rely heavily on animation’s ability to
communicate ideas through symbolism and metaphor. The question remains, however,
whether this symbolism is necessarily political in nature. Is this symbolism itself seeking
to rectify an imbalance of political power in the same way as the Eastern European
animators working and living under Communist governments?
While Hidden and It’s Like That can be read as socio-political allegories via the
very absence of the bodies they represent, it is also the case that their symbolic animation
is seeking to strike an emotional note. Giancarlo is animated with enormous, sad eyes.
He looks down as he speaks, keeping his arms by his side, and this heightens his
vulnerability. His animated form stands out from the three-dimensional live-action
images of the other children in the classroom scene as he lacks the physical substance of
his peers. As a result, we feel sorry for Giancarlo and a protective urge is evoked through
his representation as both helpless and hopeless. Similarly, It’s Like That relies on
symbolism to emotionally resonate with the audience. The cuteness of the knitted
puppets works in tandem with the sad voices of the interviewees to evoke sympathy for
the plight of these asylum seekers. The description of the detention center is
accompanied by an illustrative animated sequence in which the center’s boundary fence
is drawn as both sterile and forbidding. The use of perspective in this sequence seeks to
symbolize the looming vastness of this ‘prison’ in comparison to the smallness of the
birds (who tend to be shot from an elevated angle, as demonstrated in figure 3.6).
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Liz Blazer’s Backseat Bingo (2003) tackles an issue that, while not the political
touchpaper of asylum and immigration, is one that is still to a certain extent a social
taboo. The senior citizens interviewed in this film talk frankly about their sex lives,
challenging the perception of the aging body as a desexualized one. The short film
evokes both the confessional and dating agency videos as the different characters speak
directly ‘into the camera’ of their desire for intimacy and describe their ideal partner.
Our presumptions regarding sexual activity in old age are dispelled in the first moments
of the film when we hear David (“born in 1918”) talk about the “most romantic” moment
when he asked his partner if she would go to bed with him. Quick cuts to four other
residents of David’s retirement community reveal a cast of characters aged between 79
and 92. Sunge (84) tells us she believes you stay young because of sex. Feisty Ruth
Cooper admits that her desires in a partner have changed (“at 18 you just wanted a sex
object; at 75 you may still want sex, you’re not sure you’re going to get it, but you’re
looking for comfort.”)
The animation design in Backseat Bingo tallies with the youthful attitudes of the
interviewees. The color palate is painted in bold, primary colors and objects and bodies
are demarcated by clear, defined outlines. The facial features of the residents belie their
age. Their skin is smooth and unblemished with just a few lines to indicate wrinkles and
other signs of aging. Their body language is open and their movements indicate a
youthful vigor to match their attitudes. The style of simple cut-out animation (where
different body parts are animated individually) is reminiscent of the movement of
characters in the television series South Park and the design of the lay-outs reminds us of
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stylized retro cartoons such as the Jetsons (see figure 3.7). The overall aesthetic of the
film is one of youth and energy, colorfulness and liveliness. This reflects the attitudes we
hear on the soundtrack and together these two elements – the sound and the image – work
to confront commonly held attitudes about old age as depressing or lonely. These
residents show no indication of the slowing down we associate with retirement.

Figure 3.7: Backseat Bingo (Liz Blazer, 2003)
One could argue that the film fails to overcome the stereotype of the geriatric
body as a desexualized one. The cartoony style, along with the jaunty music, gives the
film a comedic tone. The use of animation, and this particular style of animation, could
itself be considered a cop out. Society’s disavowal of old-aged sexual activity is wrapped
up with conceptions of beauty and attractiveness, prejudices that privilege young bodies.
By hiding her subjects behind a mask of colorful, humorous representation, one that
belies many of the physical signs of aging, Blazer could be accused of simply making a
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joke out of the idea of sex in our twilight years. These potential accusations are, I would
argue, circumvented by various strategies adopted in the film.
In the closing credits of Backseat Bingo, the criticism of the absenting of the
participants is somewhat overcome. In this sequence we see still photographs of the
interviewees, subtitled with their names. Any notion of the animation being used to
protect the anonymity of the participants is dispelled at this point. The photographs
reveal faces and bodies much older, much more decrepit than the animation suggests.
The elision of wrinkles and aging physical presence in an animation style that matches
the lively voices is revealed to be an illusion. The actual bodies of the speakers reveal all
the signs of aging and the indexical photographic images lack the bright, playfulness of
the animation that helps lend the film its light tone.
As such, the film can be read as asking us to look beyond our prejudices regarding
the corporeality of the aging body and to see, instead, the physical desires such bodies
hide. This point is emphasized by David’s partner who comments that, although he may
not look it, he is a “very sensual man.” While their bodies may not be, the voices of the
interviewees are youthful and sprightly, as is their attitude towards sex and relationships.
Blazer’s aesthetic style could be argued to represent more truthfully the reality of
physical intimacy for these senior citizens, more so than their photographic likenesses.
Bill Nichols makes a distinction between embodied and disembodied knowledge
in documentaries. Documentaries traditionally favored the latter, which is conveyed
primarily through speech.
82
This is knowledge that has been externalized from human
experience and, thus, has become generalized in the way that we understand it.
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Embodied knowledge, on the other hand, is that which is situated locally and specifically
and is an “unspoken knowledge that needs to be conveyed by the body itself.”
83

Furthermore, it “cannot be separated from the body in which [it] reside[s].”
84
The
implication, or rather insistence, here is that specific, personal knowledge is carried in
and communicated through the body of the documentary subject. For us to know this
type of thing, we must see the physical body to which it is specific.
The epistemological nature of the films discussed in this chapter could not,
according to Nichols, be synonymous with embodied knowledge. These films are,
however, conveying knowledge and experiences that are deeply personal and very
specific to the subjects. These films are not just communicating the “disembodied”
knowledge that is conveyed through the heard testimony of the interviewees.
85
But we,
as viewers of these films, do not gain this knowledge through its transmission in and on
the human body. There is no physical gesture, no witnessed body language to hint at the
subtext of the words spoken. Instead, animation carries this charge, revealing through its
symbolism.
The style of animation in all three films goes beyond merely trying to copy the
look of a straight interview documentary. And it is in this ‘going beyond’ that animation
is adding something to the words we hear, just as the corporeality of the body goes
beyond words in the documentaries of embodied knowledge discussed by Nichols. What
the animation adds lies in its power to suggest and imply ideas and themes through its
symbolism. Where the body might be able to non-verbally communicate “pain, pride,
doubt,”
86
animation can also convey emotional states and attitudes. Giancarlo’s feelings
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of helplessness and abandonment are shown through the flimsy two-dimensionality of his
animated counterpart. The fears of the boys in the Australian detention center, something
that may have been written on their bodies had we been able to witness their physical
demeanor, is implied through the symbolism of the knitted birds. The youthful attitude of
the seniors in Backseat Bingo, which may have been observable in a bodily gesture or
physical delivery of speech, is instead represented in the lively, irreverent animation
style. What these three films begin to suggest is that animation has an epistemological
power of its own; a capacity to evoke the type of specific, local knowledge that Nichols
theorizes is carried by the body. This notion of animation’s symbolic potential, and its
relationship to an epistemological shift in terms of how and of what documentary is
evidential, is one that will be further explored in subsequent chapters.
Hidden, It’s Like That and Backseat Bingo complicate the relationship between
visibility and testimony. This complexity does not, I would argue, necessarily
depoliticize or disempower subjects who already lack visibility, and thus clout, in the
social world. The physical absence of the interviewees is not a choice of the filmmakers.
In Backseat Bingo the subjects felt free to express themselves frankly and openly because
Blazer promised to only use in the film the audio portion of the interviews she had
filmed.
87
The animation becomes a solution for an absence that is either demanded or, in
Hidden and It’s Like That, already present. In these two films, a conventional
documentary approach of filming the interviews, even as a basis for the animation, was
not an option. The subjects’ powerlessness becomes in itself a political message, one that
is in part articulated through the animation. This is emphasized in Hidden when Heilborn
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asks Giancarlo what he thinks she should do about his situation. His doleful response of
“I don’t know” and Heilborn’s inclusion of herself in the fabric of the film (as a character
as two-dimensional and simple in design as Giancarlo) shows that while she may, as
suggested by Foucault’s theorization of the confession, be in control of the interview, she
has as little power over what happens to him as he does.
The sadness in Giancarlo and the young boys in It’s Like That and the joie de
vivre of the senior citizens in Backseat Bingo are conveyed to us through the animated
body much as they would be in the cinematic body of a live action film. This exemplifies
Capino’s suggestion that animated bodies can evoke a response just as live action bodies
can. We respond to Giancarlo’s down-turned gaze and timid body language much as we
would respond to this behavior if we were seeing his physical, ‘real’ body. Furthermore,
the fact that he, and the other animated interviewees in the films discussed here, is not
actually present in the film adds a layer of meaning to the fabric of the text. The
expressive potentiality of physical absence in animation will be discussed further in the
following section.

Sound of Mind and Body
Dennis Tupicoff’s His Mother’s Voice (1997) animates a radio interview given by
Kathy Easedale in which she describes the night her teenaged son Matthew was shot and
killed. We hear the interview, which was broadcast on Australia’s ABC Radio in 1995,
twice, each time accompanied by different animated visuals that offer us an alternative
point of view of the events. The first hearing takes us back to April 1995, as we rush
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through the night with Kathy to the scene of the shooting and wait expectantly for news
of her son. On second hearing, we see Kathy being interviewed in her home in suburban
Brisbane and we wander around and outside her house, seeing the posters on the walls of
Matthew’s room and the quiet neighborhood in which they live. The two halves are both
rotoscoped by hand, but in different styles. The first half simplifies the frame into clearly
demarcated areas of dark shadow and color and resembles a comic book or graphic novel
(see figure 3.8). In the second half, the filmed image is traced in charcoal and the image
moves and jitters, an effect partially achieved by animating on twos, or filming each
drawing for two frames (see figure 3.9).
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His Mother’s Voice illustrates several of the issues that have been raised in this
chapter. It questions the importance of the body in delivering supplemental knowledge in
documentaries, knowledge that is not ‘disembodied.’ It also articulates the
epistemological quandaries raised by the Rotoscope, with its uncanny presence and
absence of the original profilmic material. This latter point is amplified by the
participation of actors, rather than documentary subjects, and the use of reconstructions.
Further, this film begs questions of the role of the voice in interview, testimony-based
documentaries.
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Figure 3.8: His Mother's Voice (Dennis Tupicoff, 1997)

Figure 3.9: His Mother's Voice (Dennis Tupicoff, 1997)
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We are used to learning things via a documentary’s soundtrack. The Griersonians
raised documentary sound to a level of importance that meant it frequently took
precedence over the visuals. It is often through the so-called voice of God commentary
that the didactic message of these films is communicated and the visuals work to
“illustrate, illuminate, evoke, or act in counterpoint to what is said.”
89
However, as Bill
Nichols has pointed out, the type of knowledge gained through documentary voiceover is
usually disembodied and generalized, seeking to make a broadly applicable argument.
As discussed above, when Nichols states that “it is not simply the knowledge possessed
by witnesses … that needs to be conveyed through their speech, but also unspoken
knowledge that needs to be conveyed by the body itself” he is suggesting that unspoken
knowledge can only be conveyed through the ‘body itself.’
90
Nichols is proposing the
epistemological potential of the body in interview and testimony documentaries (what he
would term the ‘interactive’ or ‘participatory mode’) as an antidote to the epistemological
hierarchy of the voice in the ‘expository mode.’
91
This is a reasonable response to the
historic relationship between voiceover and image in documentary, one that has been
overshadowed by the lecturing tones of the 1930s documentaries. However, what
Nichols’ formulation sidesteps is the expressive potential of the voice to convey more
than the information communicated through words.
Dennis Tupicoff says of Kathy Easedale’s recounting that “this is an interview
which delivers not just the basics: … factual information in the first person, more or less
intelligibly,” but that it is also “a song of lament, a mother’s song that describes time and
space unfolding as she searches for her son.”
92
There is something more than information
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being conveyed in Kathy’s words. Her delivery, her hesitation as she tries to describe her
feelings at hearing Matthew had been shot (‘my heart and my body disconnected’), her
faltering voice as she talks about the period between learning he had been shot and finally
being told he was dead, the timbre of her voice tells us more than the facts. Her voice
evokes and embodies her emotional response to the events and this emotional knowledge
is, in its own way ‘unspoken.’ It is less through her speech that we get a sense of the
awfulness of that night, but more her inability to speak – the hesitations and shallow
breaths between words. It is the voice, rather than the words spoken, that convey Kathy’s
experience.
Michael Chion has drawn our attention to this distinction between voice and
speech when he observes that “from the speech act we usually retain only the
significations it bears, forgetting the medium of the voice itself.”
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The power of the
voice itself to express and communicate gets forgotten because we tend to conflate it with
speech. Mladen Dolar stresses the distinction when he says of the voice:
it is what does not contribute to making sense… It is there, in the very act
of saying, but it eludes any pinning down, to the point where we could
maintain that it is the non-linguistic, the extralinguistic element which
enables speech phenomena, but cannot itself be discerned by linguistics.
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The voice is something that goes beyond the language we hear it speak, the voice gains
supplemental meaning through tone, delivery, timbre.
This element of the human voice that goes beyond language is what Roland
Barthes might term the ‘grain’ of the voice.
95
Although Barthes was talking about the
singing voice in his essay on this topic, his ideas translate readily to the expressive,
emotive speaking voice as heard in Tupicoff’s film.
96
Barthes makes a distinction, after
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Julia Kristeva, between two types of song: the pheno-song and the geno-song. The
former describes the qualities upon which singing is traditionally (for Barthes) judged.
Things such as the quality of the voice and how well the singer is expressing the words
he enunciates. The geno-song, however, is “nothing to do with communication,” but
rather is “the space where significations germinate ‘from within language and in its very
materiality’.”
97
Furthermore, it is “where the melody really works at the language – not
at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers.”
98
Barthes is advocating
the geno-song over the pheno-song when it comes to evaluating musical performances
because, somewhat paradoxically, the former is more true to the meaning of the text than
the latter.
What we can discern from Barthes, Dolar and Chion is that the voice has
expressive potential that goes beyond what we might be able to interpret from the words
it speaks. The meaning of what we hear in the voice goes beyond language, and this is
certainly true in His Mother’s Voice. In Tupicoff’s film we learn as much about Kathy’s
experience from how (or, in some cases, how not) she says as what she says. She recites
the events without interruption from interviewer Matt Brown. Even when she seems to
be on the verge of breaking down, and we can hear Brown attempting to intervene or
reassure, she continues as if determined to evacuate from her mind in one go the
memories of that night. Tupicoff has described this delivery as “like a metronome, or a
heartbeat, minute after minute, the rhythm of her song beats out: every 28 frames.”
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Contrasting with this are those moments when remembered hope or still raw grief
threaten to puncture the stream of recitation. Kathy’s voice wavers as she remembers the
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agonising wait for Matthew to be brought out of the house where he had been shot. A
policewoman tells her they are “probably stabilizing him,” and Kathy recalls asking
“does that mean … that he’s alive? That there’s hope?” The grief that is always present
beneath her retelling of the events comes to the surface when she speaks of the moment
she was informed of Matthew’s death. Her voice breaks, she sniffs and has trouble
finishing each word. She tells us the “most agonizing part” was watching Matthew’s
brother react to the news and describes it “as having one son die, and then watch the other
one…” Throughout the interview, Kathy never openly breaks down in tears, but at this
moment and many others we can hear them threaten to rupture the surface of the words
she utters.
The evocative nature of Kathy Easedale’s voice is amplified by the style of
animation in His Mother’s Voice. The twice playing of the interview allows for our
double witnessing of events. The stark contrasts, bold colors and clear outlines of the
events through Kathy’s eyes give way to the monochrome, blurred charcoal depiction of
the interview and her home. In the former, the harsh horror of that evening is shown
through the graphic style and shots that accentuate key moments and objects. The
telephone on which Kathy receives news of Matthew’s shooting is animated in bright,
blood red, a solitary object casting a dark shadow on a beige background. As Matthew’s
brother falls to the ground upon news of his death, he is a lone blue figure in a sea of blue
background. The camera pans around and underneath him as he rises up in a roar of
grief. We only break the re-enactment of that night’s events for moments of “wish-
fulfillment,” as Michael Renov has described them, in which Matthew appears alive and
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well.
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When Kathy speaks of the glimmer of hope when she is informed that Matthew
is being stabilized, we see him brought out of the house on a stretcher, his eyes open and
responsive. At other moments throughout this first half, Matthew momentarily appears,
embodied by an actor and animated in a softer style with a pastel color palate and none of
the harsh, black shadow of the other images in this section. By the second time we hear
Kathy’s interviews, the words and events are now familiar to us. We are free to roam
with the unknown observer around Kathy’s house, scanning over the Jimi Hendrix poster
in Matthew’s room, the ‘M’ emblazoned mug in the windowsill, looking over the fence at
the neighbor’s house. The soundtrack in this half is layered with the diegetic sounds of
the surroundings – we hear birds cawing, wind chimes tinkling, dogs barking. The
mundanity of what we see, the everydayness of this suburb in which “nothing much is
happening”
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is at odds with the story we are being told, a story of lives changing
irrevocably or ceasing altogether.
Kathy’s grief at Matthew’s death is expressed in the way she delivers her words
as much as in the meaning of the words themselves. In fact, she hardly talks directly of
her emotional response to the events and her recounting is mostly descriptive, yet we still
get an acute sense of her loss. This loss is reflected in Kathy’s physical absence from the
film. Tupicoff describes the final animation as being “twice removed from the events
being described,” first by the re-constructions that were performed by actors and then by
the animation itself. This is a disembodied voice we are hearing, although that does not
necessarily entail, as argued above and pace Nichols, that we gain only a ‘disembodied,’
impersonal knowledge from this film.
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Michael Chion has argued that the “accousmatic” voice has a special power in
cinema. The accousmatic is a “sound that is heard without its cause being seen.”
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The
acousmêtre, Chion claims, is “a special kind of being, a kind of talking and acting
shadow” which is created when we hear a voice “that has not yet been visualized – that
is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face.”
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This being, which we encounter through
its disembodied voice, has a special power, which Chion equates to “ubiquity,
panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence.”
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Chion’s theorization of the disembodied
voice has much in common with the conventional documentary voiceover, spoken by the
unseen ‘voice of God’ that, as its moniker suggests, is attributed the power of an all-
seeing, all-knowing, unseen figure. Mladen Dolar’s response to Chion’s accousmatic
voice gives us a way of understanding the type of soundtrack we hear in His Mother’s
Voice. Dolar suggests that:
One could use a French pun, and say that the voice is plus-de-corps: both
the surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the no-more-body, the end of
the corporeal, the spirituality of the corporeal, so that it embodies the very
coincidence of the quintessential corporeality and the soul.
105

Here Dolar is discussing the voice as the soul and emphasizing the specificity of the
voice to the body it inhabits. However, he also point out that the voice is not simply
reducible to the body – it is something more, a surplus, an excess.
Rather than the disembodied voice being one of power and authority, Dolar’s
reading of Chion points us towards recognizing the voice as a means of expressing the
internal and the subjective. The voice, as the soul, speaks from within and, as such, has
the capacity to reveal what is specific to this particular body that it inhabits.
Furthermore, Dolar suggests that this capacity of the voice is exemplified by the
196
disembodied, or accousmatic voice. When the voice is separated from its body it is
“powerful because it cannot be neutralized with the framework of the visible, and it
makes the visible itself redoubled and enigmatic.”
106
The acousmêtre refuses us any
simple understanding of the voice through its reconciliation with the body that produces
it. Instead, the grain of the voice is accentuated and the power of the voice itself is
amplified.
Through understanding the voice as a window on the soul, we can begin to
appreciate its expressive, epistemological power in a film such as His Mother’s Voice.
The voice, because it speaks the soul, allows us to experience Kathy’s grief. This is a
grief that is specific to her loss and the situation she describes to us in the interview. This
helps us understand how, in this film, we are gaining the kind of specific, localized
knowledge that Nichols attributes to the body. When Barthes talks of the grain of the
voice as “the materiality of the body speaking in its mother tongue” we can see a
connection between the type of knowledge Nichols describes as embodied and the type of
knowledge we can gain from Kathy’s voice in His Mother’s Voice.
107
Barthes tells us
that “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it
performs,” thus linking the material specificity of the body to the sonoral specificity of
the voice.
108
Perhaps the type of knowledge Nichols describes as embodied is not a
knowledge that we can only learn through witnessing the body itself. Following Dolar’s
urging that the voice is “the very coincidence of the quintessential corporeality and the
soul,”
109
I would suggest in the case of His Mother’s Voice the voice becomes an
alternative source of localized and specific knowledge.
197
The power and potential of the accousmatic voice becomes more complex in His
Mother’s Voice since the voice is not entirely without a body. This is especially acute in
the second half of the film. Here, the voice is assigned to a body to which it does not
belong (an actress) and then animated and brought to life in a second process that further
removes it from its original embodiment. The epistemological uncannyness of the
rotoscoped image is amplified by a voice that is accousmatic yet at the same time
synchronized, “visualized sound.”
110
By synchronizing the voice in the first half of the
film to a rotoscoped re-enactment of events the animation supplements the knowledge we
gain from Kathy’s voiceover. The animation also carries an epistemological charge of its
own, communicating Tupicoff’s interpretation of Kathy’s words through elements such
as color palate and camera angles in a way that helps us imagine her experience of
events. Synchronizing the voice second time around to the body of an animated actor
enacts a similar epistemological tension to Bob Sabiston’s and Aardman’s films
discussed above. The soundtrack is of the world of Kathy’s personal experience; what
we see is a world constructed to resemble the world as reinterpreted by Tupicoff, twice.
First Tupicoff recreates Kathy’s house in a different location (Melbourne, rather than
Brisbane), albeit “chosen and dressed with the Brisbane suburb and milieu in mind,” then
this recreation is traced in hazy, blurry charcoaled black-and-white, further removing us
from the world, yet creating a world that helps us understand and experience it.
111

We never see Kathy, yet we feel intimate with her and her experience by the end
of the film. We know some of what Kathy went through, yet we would not recognize her.
The film is haunted by images of originals, but these originals were themselves
198
substitutes for the real thing. Thus, the animated portion of His Mother’s Voice
reinforces the grief and loss about which this film speaks. We see a Matthew, as
embodied by an actor who is re-drawn, bringing him back to life, but the Matthew is as
absent to us as he is now to Kathy. Kathy’s body too is missing from the film, replaced
by a stand-in and interpreted via animation. Yet she is present also, conveying through
her voice the meaning of those events in April 1995.

Conclusion
In the examples discussed above the realization of the animation nuances the
epistemological status of the films. The animation is doing more than merely re-
presenting the world; it is more than a simple substitutive solution for missing live-action
footage. Furthermore, the primary goal of the animated visuals is not to copy or mimic
the look of either reality or its photographic/ filmic re-presentation. In this way, the
animation is more than a presence that has to be reconciled with the absence of visually
indexical images of the aurally indexical soundtrack. In going beyond simple
substitution the animation becomes an excess that has meaning in its own right. Just as
how the absent bodies in Hidden, It’s Like That and Backseat Bingo are animated
becomes symbolic of the very meaning of their absence, so too the doubled bodies in
Sabiston and Aardman’s films gain significance. Similarly, the twice rendering of Kathy
Easedale’s story demonstrates animation’s ability to offer up something additional to
what we hear on the soundtrack. In all of the films discussed, the animated images tell us
something about the world as lived in by the people whose voices we hear.
199
What these animated documentaries also remind us of is the importance of paying
attention to what we hear, as well as what we see, in a documentary. The Griersonian era
of documentary making in the UK, and the post-war March of Time style of non-fictional
film in the US, gave the soundtrack primacy by affording it a role of reassurance,
validation and information. We came to rely on the unseen speaker to reassure us of the
truth status of the image.
112
Our subsequent distrust of the dominance of the didactic, off-
screen speaker and the rejection of the disembodied voice by the Direct Cinema
documentary-makers of the 1960s, along with the concomitant acceptance of
observational filmmaking as being the mode most suited to achieving documentary’s
aims, has led to a theoretical and critical neglect of documentary sound. In particular,
Michael Renov observes that “documentary studies’ prevailing notions of indexicality,
biased as they are in favor of the visual regime, are woefully inadequate.”
113
Renov is
here drawing our attention to the powerful potential of the existential oral/ aural link
between documentary film and reality.
Testimony has long been accepted as a valid element of documentary and a
source of evidence and conveying the truth. The animated interviews discussed in this
chapter highlight this and re-emphasize that this element, testimony, is as much, if not
more, an oral and aural one as a visual one. The primacy of sound as a documentary
indicator is acknowledged in several of the films discussed above. In Hidden we see the
interviewers in the scene and co-director Aronowitsch is adorned with the paraphernalia
of sound recording – headphones, tape deck, microphones. Both Aardman’s
Conversation Pieces and His Mother’s Voice begin with shots of audio devices. The pre-
200
title shot of a tape recorder in the Aardman films acknowledges the source of the
documentary material. Similarly, Tupicoff segues into the first animated re-enactment of
Kathy’s story from a live-action shot of the old radio in his kitchen on which he first
heard her interview.
114

In this chapter I have analyzed animated interviews that raise questions of what
type of knowledge we gain from interview documentaries and how we gain that
knowledge. Rather than the knowable-through-observation type of knowledge that is
traditionally gained from conventional documentaries (as discussed in chapter two), these
films begin to suggest that documentaries have something else, epistemologically, to
offer. Through exploring animation’s symbolic and metaphoric potential, rather than its
ability to mimic the look of reality and film, the animated interviews discussed above
give us a particular insight into what we are hearing, an insight that comes from the
unique juxtaposition of animated image and indexical sound. Furthermore, these films
show us that the knowledge that has previously been theorized, by Nichols and others, as
being transferred through the human body of the documentary subject, can be conveyed
through other elements in the fabric of these films: a style of animation; a voice; the
absence of the body itself. Just as Errol Morris, in the Thin Blue Line, creatively treats
actuality in order to question the veracity of his subjects’ testimonies, so animated
interview documentaries can draw our attention to the status, function and meaning of
what we hear in documentary testimony. Thus, animated interview documentaries
suggest a shifting of documentary’s epistemological realm. We are moving away from
observations about the external world towards expressions of internal worlds. The
201
question of how and why animation is particularly suited to documentaries about
subjectivity and personal experience will be addressed in chapter four.
202
Chapter III Endnotes

1
Chanan, The Politics of Documentary, 54.

2
Ellis and McLane, A New History of Documentary, 68.

3
Eric Barnouw, Documentary, 95.

4
Holmlund and Fuchs, “Introduction,” in Between the Sheets, In the Streets, 4.

5
Oxford English Dictionary Online s.v. “testimony” and “testify,” http://dictionary.oed
.com./ (accessed August 27, 2009).

6
Winston, Claiming the Real, 140.

7
Ibid.

8
See Lackey and Sosa, The Epistemology of Testimony for a more nuanced explication of this
topic.

9
Nichols, “‘Getting to Know You…’ Knowledge, Power, and the Body,” 178.

10
Ibid.

11
Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories,” 13.

12
Ibid., 15.

13
Nichols, “‘Getting to Know You…’”,175.

14
Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 127.

15
Wayne, “Documentary as Critical and Creative Research,” 86.

16
Nichols, Representing Reality, 232.

17
Furniss, Art in Motion, 77.

18
See Wells, Understanding Animation, 21-28.

19
http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Flat_Black_Films/Films/Pages/Project_Incognito.html
(accessed Feb 13, 2009).

20
Ward, “Animated Interactions,” 116.

21
Ward, “Rotoshop in context,” 34.

203

22
Ibid.

23
See Furniss, Art in Motion, 18-19.

24
http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Flat_Black_Films/Films/Pages/Roadhead.html (accessed Feb
13, 2009)

25
Ward, “Rotoshop in Context,” 33.

26
http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Flat_Black_Films/Films/Pages/Snack_and_Drink.html
(accessed Feb 14, 09).

27
Ward, “Animated Interactions,” 120.

28
Sabiston has continued to make films with Ryan that explore the world through Ryan’s
perspective. In 1999 Sabiston made a live-action video, Ryan’s Capitol Tour, of Ryan showing
him around the Texas State Capitol building in Austin. In 2008 Sabiston and Ryan visit a Texas
theme park in The Even More Fun Trip.

29
Bouldin, “Cadaver of the Real,” 7.

30
Ibid., 13.

31
Ibid., 7.

32
Ibid., 13.

33
http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Flat_Black_Films/Films/Pages/Grasshopper.html (accessed Feb
14, 2009).

34
In A Scanner Darkly the faces and features of the characters are clearly discernible and
recognisable. The character Bob Arctor is clearly recognisable as being played by Keanu Reaves,
for example.

35
And, indeed, in all film.

36
Ward, “Rotoshop in Context,” 36.

37
David Sproxton, e-mail message to author, October 1, 2008.

38
A style of animation that is often referred to as ‘claymation’ in the US.

39
David Sproxton, e-mail message to author, October 1, 2008.

40
http://www.aardman.com/html/history.asp (accessed Feb 15, 2009). The five films are On
Probation, Sales Pitch, Palmy Days, Early Bird and Late Edition (all 1983).

204

41
And also led to many commissions for television commercials. See http://www.aardman
.com/html/history.asp (accessed Feb 15, 2009). The other films in this series are Going
Equipped, War Story, Next! and Ident.

42
David Sproxton, e-mail message to author, October 1, 2008.

43
Ward, “Animated Interactions,” 121.

44
Daivd Sproxton, e-mail message to author, October 1, 2008.

45
Ibid.

46
Ibid.

47
Wells, Understanding Animation, 60.

48
Buchan, “The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers’ ‘Worlds,’” 19-21.

49
Ivins-Hulley, “The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation,” 61.

50
Freud, “The Uncanny,” 124.

51
Ibid., 153.

52
Ibid., 155.

53
Ibid., 142.

54
See Cholodenko, “Introduction,” and Ferrell, “Life-threatening Life: Angela Carter and the
Uncanny,” both in The Illusion of Life, ed. Cholodenko.

55
Cholodenko, “Speculations on the Animatic Automaton,” 504.

56
Freud, “The Uncanny,” 150.

57
Ken Bautista collates the many reviews that compared The Polar Express (unfavourably) to the
Pixar animated feature The Incredibles. See http://www.hotrocket.ca/personal/kenbautista/luxo/
2004_11_01_archive.html (accessed Feb 17, 2009).

58
Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 55.

59
Ivins-Hulley, 63. Emphasis in original.

60
This was discussed with respect to the anxiety over the knowledge presented in Walking With
Dinosaurs in chapter two.

205

61
Blanchot and Derrida, 33. Emphasis in original.

62
Ibid., 38.

63
Not all animated documentaries are so ahistorical – see chapter five.

64
Buchan, “The Animated Spectator,” 103.

65
Nichols, Representing Reality, 109.

66
Holmlund and Fuchs, 1.

67
See Dickinson, Rogue Reels.

68
Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 90.

69
Ibid., 92.

70
It should be noted that Gaines theorises the power of the relationship between documentary and
the world as deriving from mimesis rather than indexicality. See ‘Political Mimesis,’ 93-95.

71
Capino, “Filthy Funnies,” 55-56.

72
Ibid., 56.

73
Other than, it would seem, to take his own life. According to the film’s postscript, this is what
Giancarlo attempted several months after the filmmakers interviewed him. He and his family
were subsequently granted permission to stay in Sweden.

74
http://www.documentaryaustralia.com.au/da/caseStudies/details.php?recordID=53 (accessed
Feb 6, 2009)

75
Webb, “Birds of a Different Feather.”

76
http://www.documentaryaustralia.com.au/da/caseStudies/details.php?recordID=53 (accessed
Feb 6, 2009)

77
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 58.

78
Ibid., 62.

79
Ibid., 98.

80
Nichols, Representing Reality, 47.

206

81
See chapter one.

82
Nichols, “‘Getting to Know You…,’” 174-75.

83
Ibid., 175.

84
Ibid., 184.

85
Although, I would argue, contra Nichols, that speech and testimony has a greater
epistemological valency in its own right. See the third section of this chapter.

86
Nichols, “‘Getting to Know You…,’”187.

87
Liz Blazer, e-mail message to author, Feb 17, 2009. Blazer informed me that once the subjects
had seen the film they consented to their photographs being added as a postscript.

88
Dennis Tupicoff, e-mail to author, Feb 15, 2009.

89
Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 107.

90
Nichols, “‘Getting to Know You…,’” 175.

91
See Nichols, Representing Reality and Introduction to Documentary.

92
Tupicoff, “Radio with Pictures (Thousands of them).”

93
Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 1.

94
Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 15.

95
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice.”

96
Indeed, Tupicoff describes Kathy’s testimony as a “song of lament.” Tupicoff, “Radio with
Pictures (Thousands of them).”

97
Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 182.

98
Ibid.

99
Tupicoff, “Radio with Pictures (Thousands of them).”

100
Renov, “Animation: Documentary’s Imaginary Signifier.”

101
Tupicoff, “Radio with Pictures (Thousands of them).”

102
Chion, 18.

207

103
Ibid., 21.

104
Ibid., 24.

105
Dolar, 71.

106
Ibid., 79.

107
Barthes, 182.

108
Ibid., 188.

109
Dolar, 71.

110
Chion, 18.

111
Dennis Tupicoff, e-mail message to author, Feb 15, 2009.

112
See Bruzzi, 47-72.

113
Renov, “Animation: Documentary’s Imaginary Signifier.”

114
Tupicoff, “Radio with Pictures (Thousands of them).”
208
CHAPTER IV
IN THEIR SHOES: INTERPRETIVE ANIMATION AND THE EXPRESSION OF
SUBJECTIVITY

Introduction
Previous chapters discussed animation that functions in a substitutive way – both mimetic
(chapter two) and non-mimetic (chapter three). The films examined in chapter three
show us that animation has the potential to go beyond merely substituting for reality. The
non-mimetic substitutive function, in which animation stands-in for missing live-action
footage but with less concern for copying the look of reality than the films discussed in
chapter one, begins to explore the ability of animation to express and convey the non-
concrete and the non-observable. Many of the films discussed in this previous chapter
give us a sense of the world from the point-of-view of the interviewees. They do this, I
have argued, as much through the style and look of the animation as through the words
we hear on the interview soundtrack.
This chapter will extend this argument through an analysis of animated
documentaries in which the animation functions in an interpretive way. I have suggested
in this project that animated documentaries articulate an epistemological shift in
documentary from the observable and external and towards the subjective and internal.
The films under discussion here illustrate this subjective and internal end of this
spectrum. Many of these films are, as were those discussed in chapter three, based on
interviews. The animated visuals of chapter three’s films predominately offered a
representation of the interview situation in formats ranging from Plasticine animals in
Aardman’s Creature Comforts to digitally rotoscoped figures in Bob Sabiston’s films.
209
The films of this chapter, however, focus on interpreting the words spoken by the
interviewee, rather than interpreting or representing the interview itself. This
interpretation varies from quite simple yet insightful visualizations of the words we hear
(as in Sheila Sofian’s A Conversation With Haris (2001)) to the creation of an animated
world that evokes the mental state of the interviewee (Andy Glynne’s Animated Minds
(2003) and Chris Landreth’s Ryan (2004)). It will be fruitful to establish, as a foundation
for the argument of this chapter, some of the prevailing theories and ideas regarding the
key issues that form the basis of my discussion.
As Michael Renov points out, “the domain of nonfiction was typically fueled by a
concern for objectivity, a belief that what was seen and heard must retain its integrity as a
plausible slice of the social world.”
1
However, it has been sometime since documentary
has shed the shackles of objectivity and to comment that documentaries can be subjective
is not a new observation to make. When Bill Nichols introduced the ‘performative mode’
of documentary in 1994’s Blurred Boundaries, he was marking out a new category for
films that endeavored to evoke the subjective experience of the filmmaker regardless of
the identity or subjectivity of the viewer.
2
These films demonstrate a shift away from
“the development of strategies for persuasive argumentation about the historical world”
and away from primarily communicating through referencing the historical world.
3

Instead, this new mode of documentary “seeks to evoke … the specific qualities that
surround particular people, discrete events, social subjectivities, and historically situated
encounters between filmmakers and their subjects.”
4
Unlike earlier modes of
documentary (in particular, the expository, the observational, the interactive and the
210
reflexive), which sought to convey knowledge and information about the external world,
the performative mode switches the focus to the subjective, specific knowledge of one
person or group of people’s experience of living in the world.
Michael Renov has devoted much attention to the turn towards self-representation
and autobiography that took place in documentary filmmaking between 1970 and 1995.
5

Renov suggests this development is both historically specific and culturally and socially
determined when he notes a correlation between the rise in first-person filmmaking and
“the displacement of the politics of social movements (e.g., antiwar, civil rights, the
student movement) by the politics of identity.”
6
With the politicization of personal issues
such as gender, sexuality and race, “subjectivity, a grounding in the personal and
experiential, fueled the engine of political action.”
7
This move towards subjectivity in
documentary saw the blurring of activism and filmmaking as filmmakers put themselves
in their films and spoke of their specific experiences of the social world.
The documentaries described by Nichols as ‘performative’ and the subjective
films discussed by Renov are all made from a first-person perspective. That is, the
filmmaker is conveying their experiences, feelings and points of view through the
medium of film (or video). All the films I am examining in this chapter, with one
exception, seek to convey someone else’s interiority. That is, the films are neither
directed nor the animation created by the people about whose experience we learn in
watching the film. This presents some particularly interesting philosophical and
psychological questions. In the first instance, it articulates the problem of knowledge of
other minds, a question that has been pondered by philosophers since the Nineteenth
211
Century. Furthermore, these films beg the question of how, if we can know what it is like
to be inside someone else’s head, that knowledge can be conveyed through moving,
animated images that are juxtaposed with indexical documentary elements such as filmed
images and recorded sound.
John Searle points out that conscious states are subjective, “in the sense that they
are always experienced by a human or animal subject.”
8
Furthermore, “one consequence
of the subjectivity of conscious states is that my states of consciousness are accessible to
me in a way that they are not accessible to you.”
9
The “problem of other minds,” as it is
known in analytical philosophy, identifies the epistemological asymmetry between the
access we have to our own experiences and the access we have to the experiences of
others. Alec Hyslop tells us that this asymmetry arises because we lack “the capacity to
observe those mental states [of another human] as mental states belonging to that other
human being.”
10
We can never observe or experience another person’s mental state in the
same way as that person does, even if we had the telepathic ability to plug ourselves into
that other person’s mind, because we can never gain all the knowledge and context in
which that specific person experiences that mental state. Analytical philosophy generally
accepts that I can suppose that other people have mental states that are similar to the
mental states I experience, however there is no dominant, accepted theory as to the
epistemological question of how I can know another’s mental state.
11
I am not suggesting
that the animated documentaries under discussion here present a solution to this long-
standing philosophical quandary. They do, however, engage with this problem through
presenting us with a visualization of someone else’s inner, mental life. In so doing, these
212
films encourage us to imagine what it is like to see, feel and experience the world from
someone else’s position within it.
I suggested above that interpretive animated documentaries pose a question
regarding how we can understand someone else’s point of view through image and
sound. What happens when I watch an animated documentary such as the Animated
Minds series that prompts me to imagine or feel that I know what it is like to experience
one of the mental health issues that the films discuss? Underlying these questions are
much broader and more fundamental ones, ones that go beyond the scope and topic of
this project regarding cinematic spectatorship and the perception of images.
Furthermore, they are questions that film theory, psychology and cognitive science have
yet to convincingly answer. They are, however, questions worth mooting at this point as
they connect to claims I will later be making regarding animation’s particular ability to
evoke the subjective and the personal.
Michael Forrester points out that no significant connection has been made
between “theories in media and communication studies which focus upon image
production and audience reception, and ideas in psychology where the aim has been to
understand the relationship between mental life and behaviour.”
12
He suggests such a
connection would be fruitful because “the language and discourse we employ to discuss
the mental is saturated with the lexicon of the visual.”
13
In particular, the “language of
knowing, understanding and cognising is replete with visual metaphors.”
14
Psychology
has tended to focus on mental imagery and how we see things in our ‘mind’s eye’ and
this has led to research into whether we use the same parts of our brain when we are
213
imagining images as when we are actually seeing images.
15
However, there has been
little investigation into the connection between our perception of external images and
how we understand these images, or how they come to have meaning for us, and this is
before we even begin to approach the question of how we might understand different
types of moving images differently. Neither do theories of film spectatorship, such as the
Lacanian-inflected psychoanalytic application of subject formation to spectators’
identification with the film image, help us in this regard. Similarly, a theory of animation
spectatorship is a topic that has yet to be comprehensively tackled by animation studies.
16

What I am suggesting in this chapter is that there is something about animation
that makes it particularly suitable for the purpose of conveying subjective states. This is
a quality that has been noted by other critics. Michael Renov has commented that
animated documentaries stir the imagination and evoke reality, rather than re-presenting
it.
17
Similarly, Paul Ward has suggested that animated documentaries have the potential
to reveal more of the reality of a situation than live-action and goes on to discuss
documentaries that “use animation techniques to explicitly represent and interpret the
thoughts and feelings of their subjects.”
18
Paul Wells makes similar claims when he tells
us that the use of animation to create documentary enables “the film-maker to more
persuasively show subjective reality.” He goes on to state that animation “effectively
shows the perception of reality as it is experienced” by a documentary subject and that
“this is a more truthful reality and one which is only possible to document in
animation.”
19
Wells borrows the term ‘penetration’ from John Halas and Joy Batchelor to
describe the ability of animation to “evoke the internal space and portray the invisible.”
20

214
Thus, “abstract concepts and previously unimaginable states can be visualized through
animation in ways that are difficult to achieve or which remain unpersuasive in the live-
action context.”
21
It seems that documentary and animation scholars alike acknowledge
the potential of animation to offer us knowledge of what it is like to inhabit someone
else’s specific position and experience of the world.
The question that remains, however, is why animation is more suited than live-
action to this task of representing the subjective. The idea that animation is particularly
adept at conveying the abstract is related to the use of animation, as discussed in chapter
one, to communicate scientific concepts and military maneuvers. There is a history of
using animation to explain and diagram, which grows out of the use of the equivalent
static images and graphic representation for the same purpose in books or pedagogic
situations. This prevalence of the use of images instead of words to explain abstract
concepts and ideas relies of the oft-made observation that we process images and words
differently. Scott McCloud clarifies the difference between images and words as the
difference between received and perceived information. To “get the message” of the
former we need no formal education. However, “it takes time and specialized knowledge
to decode the abstract symbols of language.”
22
John Berger points out that “seeing comes
before words” and that “the child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”
23
Ann Marie
Seward Barry extends this notion when she tells us that “what visual images express can
only be approximated by words, but never fully captured by them. Words represent an
artificially imposed intellectual system removed from primal feeling; images plunge us
into the depth of experience itself.”
24
Furthermore:
215
Both written and oral forms of language must be cognitively processed
first, whereas the image is perceptually processed along the same
alternative pathways as direct experience. The image is therefore capable
of reaching the emotions before it is cognitively understood. The logic of
the image is also associative and holistic rather than linear, so that not only
does the image present itself as reality, but it also may speak directly to
the emotions, bypassing logic, and works according to alogical principles
of reasoning.
25

Both Berger and Barry claim that there is something more readily understandable about
images than words. Those who cannot read words can often read and understand the
meaning of an image, something that is illustrated by children’s books containing many
more images than words. However, neither Barry nor Berger talks specifically about
how different types of images might be perceived or understood differently. For
example, a comparison between the perception of painting and photography might
provide a useful analogy for the difference I am aiming to establish between the capacity
of live action and animation to convey the subjective.
Bill Nichols claims subjectivity eludes indexicality and that you cannot deduce
someone’s motivations or state of mind from evidence that is visually indexical.
26
I
would suggest that the fact that animation is not necessarily iconic (although it can be, as
discussed in chapter two) and is rarely indexical, in terms of its relationship with reality,
are qualities that lend it to expressing subjectivity. It is when animation explores its
potential for visual metaphor, as it does in the films discussed below, that it begins to
demonstrate its ability to evoke our imagination of someone else’s state of mind. Scott
McCloud’s examination of comics can help us understand this and, in particular, his
query of why we “respond to a cartoon as much or more than a realistic image.”
27
He
attributes this, in part, to an abstract image’s tendency to focus on and pick out specific
216
details: “by stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that
meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.”
28
The underlying premise of McCloud’s
suggestions has foundation in neuroscience research into the different ways the human
brain responds to animated and live action images. Patrick Power cites a social
psychology study that examined the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans
of participants viewing examples of the rotoshopped, animated Waking Life (2001) and A
Scanner Darkly (2006) as well as the original live-action video footage on which the
animation was based.
29
The scans revealed that the two different sets of footage
prompted different types of brain activity. Whereas live-action images “triggered agency
and intent,” the animation “caused more activity in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex
(associated with emotional reward).”
30
Thus, this study suggests that we respond in a
more intellectual way to realistic images and in a more emotional way to non-realistic,
expressive and symbolic images. We could think, then, of the animation in interpretive
animated documentaries as responding to the representational limitations of realism,
which is precluded by its iconicity and indexicality from penetrating the surface of
exteriority.
James Elkins has suggested there are many things that are “unrepresentable,”
from the forbidden (such as child pornography) to those things one cannot bear to see
(images of the Holocaust) and things that are technically impossible to represent.
31
Also,
such things as “dream images, evanescent entoptical displays, hallucinations, and half-
forgotten notions of pictures” come under the realm of the unrepresentable.
32
Elkins
claims that “the unrepresentable is a crucial subject in modernism and abstraction” in that
217
pictures get less mimetic when they try to visualize the unrepresentable.
33
I propose that
Elkins theorization of non-art images and sacred images from the Renaissance period can
be extended to the animated documentaries under discussion here. Elkins tells us “the
unrepresentable can only be experienced as something that resists presentation while also
lending itself – partly and with forms held in reserve – to actual pictures.”
34
Moods,
emotions, states of mind and subjective experiences can be thought of as unrepresentable,
yet also as things that lend themselves to the pictorial because of the tendency to
understand mental life through images, as discussed above. Indeed, Paul Wells has
commented “it is often the case that difficult concepts of unusual codes of existence can
only be expressed through the vocabulary available to the animator because they are in
many sense inarticulatable in words but intrinsically communicated through the visual
and pictorial.”
35
This can also help us understand why animation, which is necessarily
less ‘realistic’ than live-action film, becomes a frequent choice for documentaries that
endeavor to evoke the internal and the subjective.
It will be fruitful here to parse out some of the terms that will be used frequently
in this chapter. I have implied above that animation has the ability to convey other’s
subjective experiences, and furthermore have suggested that it does this through
exploring its symbolic potential to evoke this understanding through our imagination.
Three key terms -- evocation, symbol, and imagination -- deserve attention in order to
clarify what I mean by this suggestion. One of the defining characteristics of
performative documentaries, for Nichols, is that they “stress the evocative quality of the
text.”
36
The evocative, for Nichols, is contrasted with qualities more traditional to
218
documentary – representationalism and description. To evoke is “to call (a feeling,
faculty, manifestation…) into being” and “to call up (a memory) from the past.”
37
In this
way, performative documentaries signal an epistemological shift away from logic and
evidence based on indexical images towards knowledge that is called up through the
“poetic, expressive and rhetorical” of an “experiential domain, expressively
substantiated.”
38
I will be using the terms ‘evocation’ and ‘evoke’ in a similar way to
Nichols, one that carries a “sense of altered consciousness.”
39
This definition of
evocation, one that proposes a change to our way of comprehending the world, betrays
the term’s etymological roots in magic and spirituality when it once meant to summon up
spirits and later alluded to magical operations.
40
A trace of this history remains in the
word as used by Nichols and as I use it in this project. The animated documentaries
discussed below evoke experiences and states of mind in a way that alters our perception
and conception of the world, yet in a way that we do not quite, yet, understand.
Aristotle, in De Anima, claims that images are integral to the process of
imagination when he tells us “imagination is that in virtue of which we say that an image
occurs to us.”
41
This association of image and imagination still has currency today, with
the latter defined as “forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the
senses” with the process resulting in “a mental image or idea.”
42
This long-standing
relationship between image and imagination can be seen in the habitual tendency,
discussed above, to describe the mental realms of cognition and understanding in visual
terms such as ‘I see what you mean’ and comes from the “perceptual character” of
imagination.
43
Philosopher Nigel Thomas claims that imagination “is what makes our
219
sensory experience meaningful, enabling us to interpret and make sense of it” and,
furthermore,
It is what makes perception more than the mere physical stimulation of
sense organs. It also produces mental imagery, visual and otherwise,
which is what makes it possible for us to think outside the confines of our
present perceptual reality, to consider memories of the past and
possibilities for the future, and to weigh alternatives against one another.
Thus, imagination makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has
been, and, perhaps most important, what might be.
44

Thomas’s definition helps us to understand how we might be able to “think outside the
confines of our present … reality” to imagine what it is like to experience someone else’s
subjectivity.
Even though some philosophers have rejected mental images as a way of
understanding how imagination functions, imagination has still been used in cognitive
theories of how we perceive and identify with static and moving images. Berys Gaut has
suggested that it is our imagination that allows us to identify with characters in fictional
narratives and Kendall Walton’s theory of pictorial perception involves imagining
seeing.
45
While I am not adopting the strict cognitive approach of Walton or Gaut, their
application of imagination to film theory hints towards a connection that may be useful
for this project. The association between image and imagination may help us understand
how an animated visualization of someone else’s experience can facilitate understanding
of what that experience is like via our imagination. The key point being that our
understanding is facilitated more through the animation than it would be were that
experience merely described to us using words or somehow represented in live-action
images.
220
The reason animation, as opposed to live-action, may be particularly adept at this
facilitation of imagination can be extrapolated from Scott McCloud’s suggestions as to
why we identify so readily with comic book characters. The abstract and symbolic style
of most comics makes the cartoon image more universal, allowing a greater number of us
to identify with that image. We can all see ourselves in a simplified cartoon face of a
circle filled with two dots and a line, as opposed to a photo-realistic face with whom
arguably only a few people (or just one) could identify. McCloud explains this as arising
from our tendency to see our own face, in our mind’s eye, differently from the faces of
others. Whereas we might see another person’s face in vivid detail when we interact with
them, our “mind picture” of our own face is “just a sketchy arrangement… a sense of
shape… a sense of general placement. Something as simple and basic as a cartoon.”
Thus “when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face you see it as the face of
another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon you see yourself.”
46
McCloud’s
analysis suggests that the mental images we create when we imagine something (such as
our own face) are not photo-realistic, but are far more abstract, simple and symbolic. It
may be that the less realistic animated images become the more readily we project
ourselves into the situation because these images more closely resemble how we imagine
the world and our own experiences.
In Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, a symbol is a sign that “would lose the
character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. Such is any utterance of
speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that
signification.”
47
The interpretant, or our understanding of what a sign means, is to a great
221
extent culturally determined in symbolic signs. A symbol comes to have meaning not by
virtue of “resemblance to its object nor an existential bond with it,” but by a convention
of acceptance as it standing in for its object.
48
While, as Peter Wollen tells us, cinema is
dominated by icons and indexes there are certain symbolic cinematic devices and images
that have come to gain conventional, accepted meaning in film. Thus, a tight close-up of
a character’s face that becomes wavy and blurry before cutting to another image has
come to signify that this second image is a dream-sequence or other representation (such
as a flash-back or hallucinogenic experience) of that character’s internal world. It is the
waviness and blurriness of the first shot as it transitions to the second that indicates this
subjective point of view to the audience. This waviness and blurriness is not iconic (it
doesn’t look like a dream), but rather it symbolizes a dream by virtue of the general
acceptance of the meaning of this filmic device.
McCloud tells us that symbols are “images we use to represent concepts, ideas
and philosophies.”
49
I would add to this that symbols more readily represent the internal
such as mental states and feelings than iconic or indexical images because these
subjective experiences have no visual or physical equivalent in the objective world.
Rudolph Arnheim indicates this when he describes symbolism as “the relation between a
concrete image and an abstract idea.”
50
In his analysis of Michelangelo’s Creation of
Man Arnheim points out that our understanding of the painting is gained from more than
just “taking cognizance of an external object,” but rather the meaning of the painting is
aroused in the viewer and produces “the kind of stirring participation that distinguishes
artistic experience from the detached acceptance of information.”
51
In this example, the
222
abstract idea of a divine life-giving force is conveyed through the painting’s symbolism,
rather than its iconic elements.
The style of animation in the films discussed below is often symbolic and, as
suggested above, it is through this symbolism that they convey the abstract and internal
of someone else’s subjectivity. However, I’d suggest that our understanding of the films
is more complex than simply understanding symbolic images that have meaning through
social and cultural convention. We get a certain amount of information about the
scenario being depicted through the voice-over that imparts knowledge through
description or, in some of the films, from the live-action imagery with which animation is
combined. None of these elements could work on its own to convey the same sense of
subjective experience. It is the combination of the conventional documentary elements
that have an indexical link to reality and the animation, which is entirely constructed, and
the tension between the two, that this work is done. We can think of indexical (in the
form of sound or image) and symbolic (in the form of animation) as having a dialectical
relationship and it is through their synthesis that the meaning of the film is conveyed.
The dialectic nature of animated documentary has been noted by Paul Ward, who
comments,
it can be argued that animated films offer us an intensified route into
understanding the real social world, by virtue of the particular dialectic
that is set up between knowing that this is a film about a real person …
and knowing that what we are looking at is an animated construction.
52

Furthermore, I would extend this dialectic relationship to one between the abstract
concepts of absence and excess that is articulated by the animated form in a documentary
context. The animation itself is an excess, something that goes beyond merely
223
representing a description on the soundtrack or duplicating live-action images. Through
its symbolic, non-iconic characteristics, its style of visual manifestation becomes a
qualitative challenge for the viewer – something that has to be comprehended as well as
perceived. Yet, the animation also signifies an absence. An absence of original filmed
material and the absence of the body of the voice(s) we hear on the soundtrack. This
push-and-pull between presence and non-presence, excess and absence creates a space in
which our imagination positions us in someone else’s subjectivity, a space that is
physically and philosophically impossible for us to inhabit. Yet still, the animated
documentary invites us to occupy it through a symbolic and dialectic evocation.

Sheila Sofian’s Illustrated Interviews
Animator Sheila Sofian has created several animated documentaries based on
recorded interviews. In this section I will discuss two of her films – Survivors (1997) and
A Conversation with Haris (2001). In both films Sofian explores an approach first
adopted in Survivors of using “visual metaphors and abstract animation to illustrate the
interview.”
53
Through a style she describes as “surreal, expressionistic drawn animation”
we see a visualization of the words spoken by the interviewees as well as an
interpretation of their meaning.
54
We do not, contrary to many of the films discussed in
the previous chapter such as Hidden, see any representation of the interview itself.
Furthermore, any representation of the interviewee is either fleeting or gives no
indication of being a likeness of the person it depicts.
224
In A Conversation with Haris, Sofian interviews Haris Alic, a young Bosnian boy
from Sarajevo who moved to the US with his family after the Bosnian War. Haris
describes the destruction the conflict wreaked on his hometown and the death of
members of his extended family at the hands of the Serbian forces. Sofian interprets his
words in two ways, via direct illustrations of events or objects mentioned by Haris and
also by giving a visual equivalent to the states of mind and emotions he describes
experiencing. For example, when he describes how he hoped to see the Statue of Liberty
as he flew into New York for the first time, we see an animated image of the Statue.
Similarly, when he talks about his family members who were killed, we see figures
disappear, one-by-one, from a family photograph. This illustration is symbolic at times,
such as when Haris accuses the Serbians of wanting to “have the whole country for
themselves” and we see the hand of a Serbian soldier come into frame and grasp up a
mass of land that symbolizes former Yugoslavia. Yet, Sofian also uses animation to
express Haris’s emotional experiences, such as when he talks of his disorientation at
moving from New York to Baltimore. Here the color palate becomes dark and ominous
in shades of black. An image of a lone white figure receding into a vast black
background becoming smaller and smaller until it is swallowed up entirely evokes the
sense he describes of feeling alone.
For Survivors Sofian interviewed victims (or ‘survivors’ as one voice corrects us
early in the film) of domestic violence, along with the professionals who work both with
such women and the men who habitually abuse and attack their partners. Sofian edited
together portions of these separate interviews to create the audio-track of the sixteen-
225
minute film. This seamless aural insight into domestic violence is illustrated through
imagery that is both iconic and symbolic. In a similar style to A Conversation with Haris
the animation flows between picking out elements or words of the interview as we hear
them and evoking more abstract concepts such as fear and social attitudes. When one
survivor describes her punishment for coming home late, we see a woman’s hand turn a
door handle and a fist then coming straight towards us as she says “…entering the
apartment, he just coldcocked me.” Here the animation picks out the key element of her
account - arriving home and the unexpected punch coming from behind the opening door.
At another point in the film the images clarify ideas that are alluded to by the
interviewee. Brian, who works with men who have abused their partners, describes how
these men often “have very rigid ideas about what the man’s role is and what the female
role is.” The animation that accompanies this statement illustrates his point with a female
figure that metamorphoses between the traditional female roles of secretary, housewife
and mother. Sofian also uses animation in a less direct way so that images are not always
simply giving visual form to what we hear, but are also evoking abstract concepts such as
emotions. As one woman describes her mother’s refusal to let her move back home,
telling her she’s “made her bed,” we see a figure trapped underneath a sheet, struggling to
break free. This image does more than visualize the metaphor spoken by this woman’s
mother. The figure’s desperate, futile straining at the oppressively smothering bed
clothes that keep her pinned in place also evokes this woman’s sense of frustration at
being imprisoned in her domestic situation. The feeling of being trapped is further
evoked by the animated bed sheet first being pulled across the screen, filling the space
226
and obliterating the face that had previously been ‘speaking’ the mother’s words. The
vastness of this inescapable trap is amplified in the following frames as the bed on which
the woman is trapped occupies almost the entire frame with only an empty blackness
surrounding it (see figure 4.1). This expressive use of animation to evoke some of the
more abstract ideas we hear the interviewees discuss is a prevalent feature of Survivors.

Figure 4.1: Survivors (Sheila Sofian, 1997)

Sofian animated the women in the film in a way that bore no likeness to their real
life counterparts. The women wished to remain anonymous and Sofian found audiences
responded that the use of animation instead of live-action prevented them from making
judgments about the women based on their appearance.
55
Sofian also sought to make the
animated realizations as universal as possible so that a wide audience would be able to
empathize with the situations of the women whose accounts we hear.
56
This approach
227
resonates with Scott McCloud’s suggestions, discussed above, that the more abstract and
less specific a figure or face is, the more people can identify with it. To further achieve
this Sofian animated multiple characters to represent each woman’s point of view, thus
no one animated figure is identified with any one voice we hear on the soundtrack. So,
while the images of the women are iconic in that they are recognizable as women in
general, they do not resemble the actual women we hear speaking. The universality of
the image is aided by the representation of different races and physical characteristics so
that no one ‘type’ becomes associated with domestic violence.
The materiality and aesthetic of the animation technique chosen by Sofian for
each film comes to have a thematic meaning in itself. For Survivors she hand-drew the
images using crayons, a medium we usually associate with children’s drawings. The
waxy-grainy texture of the crayon’s mark is amplified by Sofian’s choice to animate the
film using a 4-field, or on an area that measures only four-inches square. The lo-tech
simplicity of the animation technique and its associations of childhood and innocence
works a double effect in the film by making the visuals accessible and “friendly,” as
Sofian has described the animation, as well as counterpointing the harshness and brutality
of the women’s stories.
57
A Conversation with Haris was created by painting-on-glass
animation. Here a picture of an image, which is painted onto opaque Plexiglas, is taken
with the film camera before the image is altered and re-painted and filmed again. As
Sofian points out “I am destroying the artwork as I create it.”
58
Unlike other forms of
drawn animation in which the individual images continue to exist after they have been
filmed, the images that make up A Conversation with Haris are ephemeral and
228
impermanent. This process of production can be thought of as a metaphor for the
repeated process of upheaval and resettling that Haris has endured since the Bosnian
conflict. In both these films the animation technique itself becomes another source of
symbolism for the themes Sofian explores.
In A Conversation with Haris the painted images transition into each other via a
series of frames of ‘blank canvas.’ Thus the delineation of the painted form dissolves and
disappears into a block of hazy color, or sometimes no color at all, before evolving into
the next clearly identifiable object or figure. This process of progression through
dissolution becomes another symbolic signifier. Haris’s world is collapsed and re-built
multiple times in this film. For both films, Sofian chooses techniques that allow a certain
fluidity of movement and transition between images. Thus, it is not just the symbolism
of the static, isolated image that comes to evoke and have meaning in her films, but also
the metamorphosis from one image to another.
Metamorphosis is a process to which animation lends itself particularly well and
something that cannot be achieved in live-action film without the aid of digital imagery
created via computer technology. In fact, Paul Wells considers metamorphosis so
integral to animation that he has called it “the constituent core of animation itself” and
Sergei Eisenstein celebrated the “plasmaticness” that he considered unique to
animation.
59
Wells defines metamorphosis as “the ability for an image to literally change
into another completely different image, for example, through the evolution of the line,
the shift in formations of clay, or the manipulation of objects or environments.”
60

Sofian’s use in A Conversation with Haris and Survivors of hand-drawn and painted
229
techniques, ones that allow complete freedom to alter the image in both subtle and
extreme ways, lend themselves to this type of seamless visual evolution of the form.
While in A Conversation with Haris the image evolves via a series of dissolves,
the images in Survivors often move in a more traditionally metamorphic way,
transforming from one clear object to another in “a fluid linkage of images through the
process of animation itself rather than through editing.”
61
One woman describes turning
to her pastor as a last resort and receiving the advice that she must stay with her husband
because “God does not want people to be divorced.” We see the figures of a man and a
woman standing in front of a large cross, the horizontal strut of which folds inwards and
forces the couple together. The couple literally disappears under the pressure, and as a
blob of unidentified matter falls out from the folds of the cross, the cross itself morphs
into a couple bound tightly together by rope. While the woman struggles to break free,
two hands close in prayer around them. The smooth transition between these stages and
objects clearly symbolizes the uselessness of the Church’s advice in this woman’s
situation as the physical binding of her to her abusive partner leads to their eventual
destruction and her disappearance from the frame.
Scott Bukatman has said of digital morphing that it “holds out the promise of
endless transformation and opportunity to freely make, unmake, and remake oneself.”
62

This echoes Eisenstein’s much earlier suggestion that our attraction to the metamorphosis
found in US studio animation is due to “its trait of all-possible diversity of form.”
63

There is something primal, Eisenstein claims, about our attraction to the metamorphic,
plasmatic form. Wells, however, points out that “in enabling the collapse of the illusion
230
of physical space, metamorphosis destabilises the image, conflating horror and humour,
dream and reality, certainty and speculation.”
64
I would suggest that Wells’ reading of
metamorphosis gives us a better understanding of the symbolism of the fluidity of
transition in Survivors, where the instability of the human form can be seen as
representing the lack of security in these abused women’s lives. This can be seen in one
sequence in which a woman describes being beaten so badly by her husband while she
was pregnant that it induced early labor. Her heavily expectant form morphs and
transforms, reflecting the fragility of her body in this physical state. Metamorphosis, in
this case, is less an opportunity to “freely … remake oneself” and more a metaphor for
uncertainty and the destruction of self-image that comes with persistent physical and
mental abuse.
Thus, the fluidity of bodily transformation in Sofian’s film illustrates Vivian
Sobchack’s suggestion that morphing is a “representational practice whose specific
material means radically interrogate certain traditional notions of coherence and self-
identify in space and time.”
65
Morphing thus “breaks down ontological and
epistemological boundaries” by leading us to question the very things that we previously
thought were unquestionable – the physical presence of the body and our knowledge of
our own identity.
66
Here, once again, we return to the symbolic absence of animation
when we consider Norman M. Klein’s theorization of the moments that occur between
the two extremes of an animated metamorphosis, or “ani-morphing,” as he calls it.
67
This
moment, or “ani-morph,” is the “lapse or hesitation” between the extremes.
68
It is “solid
and absent at the same time. It is like a scar that narrates, a Braille of absences.”
69
The
231
present-absence of the animated image is exacerbated through the process of
metamorphosis, in which the form transitions through a period of non-presence as it
transforms from one recognizable image to another. As the image de- and reforms we are
forced to consider the meaning of this visual transience. Visual instability mirrors
physical instability while the process of metamorphosis must also be reconciled as an
excessive gesture that goes beyond the mere representation of two different objects.
Their connection through a transformative process of destruction and reconstruction is a
process of both too much and not enough, one that in this case reflects the physical and
mental experiences of the abused women.

Inside Out: Animating Internal Worlds
The capacity of metamorphosis and highly malleable and non-realistic forms of
animation to express subjectivity explored by Sheila Sofian has been further developed
by Alan Jennings in Running in Darkness (2007). In this film Jennings uses the painting-
on-glass method of animation to evoke the confusion and disorientation of the brain
disorder Alzheimer’s. Working on a piece of glass measuring five-inches by eight-
inches, Jennings creates images that move in smooth swirls of fluid motion. The color
palate is at times very dark and the magnification of the original glass ‘canvas’ means the
brush strokes and pigment of the paint are visible, often the only identifiable elements in
a swathe of blacks and dark browns. The look of the film is reminiscent of the direct,
camera-less animation of Len Lye and Norman McLaren discussed in chapter one.
Unlike Sofian’s films, there is little direct connection between the testimony we hear,
232
from relatives of suffers of Alzheimer’s, and the images we see. Rather than an overt
illustration of the soundtrack, we see a seemingly free-form animation of figures and
shapes. Spirals morph into abstract human figures that recede into the void of a
background. An image of a pencil transforms into a tightrope line that bisects the screen
from corner to corner along which a loping figure tries to walk as one woman describes
handwriting that got “shakier and shakier.” This highly symbolic visual accompaniment
to the audio testimony works to evoke the mental deterioration that comes with this
degenerative brain disorder, as well as to convey the families’ sense of disconnection
from their loved ones.
This section will discuss a selection of films that use animation to convey the
internal, subjective experience of mental states associated with brain disorders and
psychological illness. All the films discussed here maintain an indexical link with reality
through their audio tracks, which consist of testimony from those whose mental
experiences are being conveyed. As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, it is
through the dialectical relationship between the aurally indexical documentary sound and
the constructed, animated visuals that these films begin to evoke the subjective. Thus, it
is not just the mêlée of swirling paint that evokes the subjectivity of Alzheimer’s in
Running in Darkness, but the combination of this imagery with the verbal recounting on
the soundtrack and the contrast between these two elements. Furthermore, the films
discussed here reveal how the malleable specificity and individuality of animation lends
itself to the exploration of the specificity and individuality of subjective, mental states.
233
Animated Minds is a series of four short films about mental health, first broadcast
on the UK’s Channel 4 in November 2003. The shorts were commissioned as part of a
season on mental health and each three-minute film tackles a different issue. Each film is
comprised of animated visuals accompanied by testimony from one person talking about
their experience. Fish on a Hook features Mike, who suffers from agoraphobia and panic
attacks; in Dimensions Chas talks about his experience with psychosis, or paranoid
schizophrenia; Steve reveals the repetitive behavior induced by obsessive compulsive
disorder in Obsessively Compulsive; and The Light Bulb Thing reveals the highs and lows
Hannah endured with manic depression. The series was overseen by Andy Glynne, a
clinical psychologist-turned-documentary director and producer, and the look of each
film was created by a different animator. The films have distinct animation styles,
betraying the different creative approaches but also, more importantly, revealing the way
animation can be designed and manipulated to match a film’s subject matter.
The films have been described as allowing us to “climb inside the minds of the
mentally distressed,”
70
and demonstrate the penetrative power of animation as outlined by
Paul Wells. Through this “revelatory tool, used to reveal conditions or principles which
are hidden or beyond the comprehension of the viewer” animation “becomes a mediator
of possibilities, offering as close to a visceral revelation of the condition as a medium of
expression can offer.”
71
The variation in animation styles and techniques demonstrates
the relationship between what we see and what is evoked in the imagination of the
audience and shows that a style that reveals the experience of agoraphobia will not reveal
the (un)realities of paranoid schizophrenia. It is not, therefore, only the iconic aspects of
234
the animated images that evoke the different mental states, but also the way in which
these images are drawn, or their symbolic aspect. The animated world of each individual
story goes to evoke the internal world of the interviewees and this is emphasized when
the four films are compared and contrasted.

Figure 4.2: Animated Minds: Fish on a Hook (Andy Glynne, 2003)

Any mental health issue or psychological disorder will alter the way the sufferer
perceives and interacts with the world and other people. The outside world can become a
terrifying, intimidating place for sufferers of both agoraphobia and paranoid
schizophrenia. However, the different ways the world becomes ominous under these two
conditions is evoked by Fish on a Hook and Dimensions respectively. In the former,
Mike’s existence is a constant battle with unbearably long staircases and crowded public
spaces, as terrifying as the wide-open ocean to a non-swimmer. To Chas, the world
becomes increasingly disordered and confusing as he slips further into psychosis and is
bombarded by frightening messages and voices that layer into a jumble of visual and oral
235
static. Fish on a Hook uses the traditional mono-medium of drawn animation, whereas
Dimensions uses live-action that is manipulated, treated and overlaid with animated
images. The use of mixed media in the second film helps to evoke Chas’s experience of
the world as disjointed and disturbing.
Both styles of animation, in tandem with the voice-overs, work to evoke the
specifics of each affliction. In Fish on a Hook the safe confines of Mike’s apartment,
with clearly demarcated walls and windows, is contrasted to the vast boundlessness of the
outside world. At one point Mike describes himself as “a prisoner who’s moved out into
a very hostile area” and we see him as a lone white, faceless figure tiptoeing through a
huge mesh-like box made of gridlines against a dark blue background (see figure 4.2).
The agoraphobic’s fear of open spaces is effectively evoked through this imagery,
without the interviewee needing to overtly explain the pathology of his condition.
Instead, Mike tells us about the specifics of his daily life – the lack of food in his
refrigerator forcing him to leave his apartment, the fact that the local supermarket may as
well be “hell.” Similarly, the symbolism of the vast looming staircase up which Mike, a
tiny figure compared to the height of each step, must drag his shopping, clearly
symbolizes the difficulty of this seemingly simple task. It is the specificity of Mike’s
account combined with the broad symbolism of the images that allows us to imagine
what it is like to suffer from agoraphobia. The animated figure that stands-in for Mike is
sufficiently non-realistic, with no distinct facial or other features, for anyone to be able to
project themselves into the frame, in a similar way to how Scott McCloud theorizes we
identify with the symbolic, non-realistic faces in comic books. Yet, the design of this
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figure, with its large lumbering body and disproportionately small head, encourages us to
imagine ourselves in a certain way, as having an uncomfortable physical form that
awkwardly occupies space.
In Dimensions the layering of multiple live-action images, which are often then
further overlaid with animation, contributes to our understanding of how Chas
experiences the world. This sense is heightened by the regular, persistent ‘flickering’ of
the visual elements of the film, accompanied by sounds of static on the audio track – as if
reality is constantly being re-tuned. Chas initially experiences a benign alternative
reality, with delusions of grandeur, but an increasingly threatening world is evoked
through progressively disturbed and disturbing images. Chas’s feelings of persecution
and paranoia are conveyed, for example, with messages scrawling across the screen
encouraging self-harm.
Obsessively Compulsive also explores the potential of mixing live-action and
animation. Although, the contrast between this film and Dimensions once again
illustrates the potential of animation as a tool of evoking the specificity of mental states.
Whereas Chas’s psychosis involves an altering of his perception of the outside world,
Steve’s obsessive-compulsive disorder affects him through “intrusive thoughts” about
Saddam Hussein and his conviction that unless he banishes these thoughts he will
escalate the conflict taking place in the Gulf. Thus, in Dimensions we are given a
voyeuristic view of the world, always watching from a distance, removed from the
images we see. In Obsessively Compulsive, however, the live-action images literally
invade the sufferer, both physically and mentally. The film uses an actor, whose
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movements are superimposed into an animated backdrop using stop-motion. These
movements are then repeatedly looped to convey the behavior of repetitive actions that
Steve feels he has to complete in order to rid his mind of intrusive thoughts. These
thoughts are visualized through the further superimposition of live action images onto
Steve’s body and onto the objects of his daily life. We see live-action images of the Gulf
Conflict playing inside ‘Steve’s’ head (see figure 4.3) and, later, onto a cup of coffee as
he tells us even everyday tasks had to be completed in the absence of an intrusive
thought. A stop-motion animated hand repeatedly picks up and puts down the cup of
coffee as the image of Saddam persistently appears on the surface of the dark liquid. The
obsession with ridding his body and mind of intrusive thoughts is conveyed through
further sequences such as Steve repeatedly peeling skin from the back of his hand, which
is superimposed with images of the Gulf War that stubbornly refuse to disappear, no
matter how many layers of epidermis are removed. In Obsessively Compulsive the
invasion of Steve’s body and mind with thoughts about Saddam Hussein and the war is
effectively evoked through the relationship between animation and live action. The
superimposition of images onto the human body is symbolic of the obsession and
psychological distress Steve describes, much as the distortion and layering of the images
in Dimensions, and the voyeuristic nature of the live-action material symbolizes Chas’s
psychosis. While both films use a combination of live-action and animation, the
differences in style and approach work to evoke the differences in the psychological
disorders represented.
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Figure 4.3: Animated Minds: Obsessively Compulsive (Andy Glynne, 2003)

With The Light Bulb Thing we return to a more simple, traditional 2D style of
drawn animation. Similarly to Fish On a Hook, the symbolism here is more directly
linked to the words we hear. Thus, when Hannah describes how her increasingly erratic
behavior led people to slowly “withdraw their trust,” we see a visualization of this
experience that aids our imagination of what it would be like to be in Hannah’s position.
A female figure sits on a couch, initially with two other people who are then erased from
the frame one-by-one. First the person sitting next to the female figure disappears and
then the other, who is sitting at the opposite end of the sofa from the woman as if
attempting to get as far away from her as possible, also leaves the frame. The subsequent
metamorphosis of couch to hospital bed conveys a sudden, yet apparently seamless
transition, one that Hannah sums up as “then you’re on your own and then… you’re in
hospital.” Her experience of feeling lost and ungrounded after coming down from the
manic phase of manic depression is evoked in the final scene where we see a solitary
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female figure sitting on a chair in a vast empty space (see figure 4.4). The limited-style
of animation, the lack of outline with space instead being demarcated by solitary objects,
and the pallid hues of the color palate illustrate Hannah’s sense of loss and isolation.
This sense is further highlighted by comparison to earlier portions of the film, in which
Hannah describes the euphoria of the manic phase, which is visualized with a frame that
is much fuller and more colorful.

Figure 4.4: Animated Minds: The Light Bulb Thing (Andy Glynne, 2003)

The varied use of animation in the four Animated Minds shorts allows us to
penetrate the accounts we hear being spoken and becomes a tool “to reveal conditions or
principles which are hidden or beyond [our] comprehension.”
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The presence of the
animation, with its ‘excess’ of aesthetic and style that goes beyond merely representing
reality or illustrating a soundtrack, works far more effectively than talking heads footage
of the interviewees. Furthermore, while we may learn via the audio track certain facts
and characteristics of each interviewee’s mental illness, it is the animated image that
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prompts us to project ourselves into their subjective worlds. The evocative images,
working in tandem with the voiceovers, encourage us to imagine the world from their
psychological point of view. Not only do these films dispel myths surrounding disorders
such as paranoid schizophrenia, but they also facilitate a greater understanding of mental
health issues by allowing the viewer access to the specific experiences of these four
people.
A is for Autism (1992) differs from the Animated Minds series in that it uses
drawings made by those whose subjectivity the film is investigating. These drawings are
animated and combined with live-action images and a soundtrack in which autistic people
talk about their experiences of living with the learning disability. Commissioned by the
UK’s Channel 4 as part of its Disabling World season, the film, much like the Animated
Minds shorts, sought to reveal a condition surrounded by stereotyping and
misunderstanding through creating “a small window into the condition of autism.”
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Autism manifests primarily in difficulty in social communication and interaction and the
contributors to the film represent the ten percent of those with autism who are able to
communicate and reflect on their condition. Paul Ward has noted that autism is a
“spectrum of disorders” that can vary from mild to severe and while the condition tends
to cause a “triad of impairments” regarding social communication, interaction and
imagination, it will often affect people in very different ways.
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The film conveys this
sense of a spectrum of disability by picking out common traits of autism, such as love of
routines, sensory sensitivity and intense special interests, yet it also prevents us from
making any broad generalizations about the condition through the specificity and
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individuality of the images and animation. Even though this understanding is facilitated
by autistic people who are at the more able end of the spectrum, their contribution can
still “provide a glimpse into the experience of the vast majority who are not able to
communicate or express themselves in this way.”
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Producer Dick Arnall points out that “animation was a tool used to present the
subject, not the artistic medium in its own right.”
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However, I would contend that it is
not only the contributors’ drawings themselves, but also the way these drawings are
brought into motion and compiled that facilitates our understanding of their condition. In
Animated Minds it is often the images themselves that come to help us understand the
four mental health issues the films discuss (for example, a wriggling fish symbolizing
Mike’s physical struggle with agoraphobia). In A is for Autism the actual pictures we see
in the film work less overtly to convey the subjectivity of autism. Paul Wells has claimed
that the drawings, through “prominent colours, distortions and omissions in
representative forms, over-elaborated or scarcely detailed figures and objects, or the mere
spontaneity of the line, all reveal aspects of a condition which few can understand or
engage with.”
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However, I would suggest that these traits are less immediately
identifiable as indicative of autism to the untutored eye seeing the images fleetingly on
the screen. For example, it is not clear how the drawings of trains we see early on in the
film relate to the topic of autism in general or how they might help us understand this
condition. To an unaware viewer they may look like any drawings from a child’s hand.
However, these drawings crop up repeatedly and trains are frequently seen chugging
through the frame until, towards the end of the film, we hear Daniel Sellers talk about
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how much he likes to draw these objects. His discussion reveals his intense interest in
this topic, to the point of being able to draw from memory different types of locomotive
in great detail. Daniel’s drawings of the trains and their repeated appearance in the film
become a metaphor for this common trait of autism, without us being overtly told that
obsessive fixation on special interests is a characteristic of the disability. Trains, and
even Daniel’s individual drawings of them, do not directly convey autism, it is only when
these images are animated and included throughout the film that they begin to gain
symbolic meaning.
Other images gain meaning and imply the subjectivity of autism through their
animation and repetition. Towards the beginning of the film one man tells us of his
childhood fascination with numbers. We see hand drawn numbers and calendars scroll
across the screen while he tells us that once or twice he counted up to a thousand (and
that “it took him hours!”). In the background we can hear a male voice beginning to
count – “one.. two.. three…” – the voice fades out, but can be reheard periodically
throughout the film and at these moments we once again see numbers and calendars on
the screen as the voice fades back in. The closing of the film coincides with the
culmination of this task as we hear the voice reach the numeric goal of one thousand.
The tendency for autistic people to develop strong interests and also to be able to focus
on them intently is illustrated by the counting. It fades in visually and aurally and
punctuates the film with a reminder that while we may have lost interest in this simple
task the counter has not.
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Repetition of both visual and aural elements of the film becomes key to our
understanding of autism. Many of the contributors talk about their need to repeat tasks
and the comfort that comes through this, yet also the frustration it creates for those
around them. This is evoked in the final images of the film in which a hand rips strips
from a sheet of paper on which an animated figures walks up a flight of stairs. As the
child’s hand rips away the animated figure gets stuck in a loop at the top of the stairs (see
figure 4.5). Like a needle jumping on a record, the figure reaches the top only to jump
back down several steps and it fails to achieve its goal of getting up the stairs before the
child’s hand rips off and crumples up the final strip of paper. This sequence conveys
both the necessity and futility of repeated action and the frustration that arises for both
the autistic person and his/her caregiver.

Figure 4.5: A is for Autism (Tim Webb, 1992)
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The sense of isolation that comes with autism is evoked in several scenes in the
film. A simple animation of many figures of children playing is animated to a voiceover
describing being ostracized by classmates because “kids don’t like kids who are
different.” One animated figure stands stiff and still while others run and jump around it.
This static figure does not look any different from the others; they are all drawn and
animated in a similar style of outlined figures on the white background. This illustrates
the point that while autistic children do not obviously look disabled, their condition
presents in less visible ways that prevents them from fully interacting with their peers.
The identification with the feeling of social isolation is aided by the symbolic
representation of the animated children onto whose non-realistic likenesses we can
project ourselves. Issues of self-identity are further evoked in a sequence using a
combination of pixilation, or the frame-by-frame manipulation and movement of people,
and drawn animation. A ‘mother’ (played by an actress) sits cradling a two-dimensional
drawing of a little girl as a woman’s voice describes her childhood craving to be held and
comforted that conflicted with her difficulty with being touched. Frame-by-frame the
image of the little girl shrinks, until it finally disappears leaving the mother empty
handed. The disappearance of the girl is another indication of how autistic people can
feel removed from society.
A is for Autism works to visualize autism through the animation of drawings made
by those whose perspective is being represented in the film. While I have argued that our
understanding of autism is greatly facilitated by the way the drawings are animated and
compiled, it is undeniable that the basis for this understanding is formed by the drawings
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made by autistic people who were asked about their own experiences and perception of
the world. This revelation of the internal from a combination of insider and outsider
perspectives is an approach adopted by Chris Landreth in his Oscar-winning animated
documentary Ryan (2004). In this short film, Landreth conveys both his own subjectivity
and that of animator Ryan Larkin through 3D computer-generated animation. The
soundtrack edits together an interview between Landreth and Ryan with interviews with
two other people from Ryan’s past and Landreth’s intermittent voiceover narration. This
accompanies a constructed visual world in which we see Landreth and Ryan talking in a
cafeteria, based on the one in the mission house where Ryan lives. The key images are
all hand-drawn and then animated using various computer software programs and
techniques. Landreth’s film is an intriguing combination of the photo-realistic and the
interpretive and it is this contrast that, in part, enables us to get inside both Landreth’s
and Ryan’s heads.
In the opening moments of the film, Landreth establishes the premise of what he
calls “psycho-realism.”
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We see Landreth leaning on a hand basin in front of a mirror in
a grimy public bathroom. His form is realized in a photorealistic way, and he clearly
resembles the real Chris Landreth. That is, apart from the bright slashes of color that
bisect his cheek like scars and the yellow nebula on the side of his head. Landreth
introduces himself and tells us that these marks are “from October 1989, when my
unbridled romantic worldview was permanently shattered,” and “from September 1982
when I underwent a catastrophic failure to manage my finances in any meaningful way.”
Immediately, Landreth is establishing the relationship between the physical and the
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psychological by showing us how mental scars are rendered visible via bright, computer-
generated imagery. He is also setting up the film’s contrast between the realistic and the
highly symbolic. Unlike other films discussed in this section, Ryan bears a much closer
resemblance to the physical world through its rendering of external reality in a relatively
realistic way. It is, however, through the application of animated interpretations of
subjectivity onto realistic animated images that this film works to evoke the internal
world of its subjects. Landreth’s application of computer technology within a
documentary to portray the internal, rather than to explain observable facts about the
external world of giving precedence to mimicking the look of reality, demonstrates a
unique attitude to the possibilities of this technology. According to Landreth this comes
from
a belief I have in using advanced tools and CG. Unlike the way they’re
generally used, to doggedly recreate photorealism or to tell superficially
imaginative stories, what I think they can also be used for is to show, in a
very detailed and realistic way, something that is not necessarily, literally
realistic — which, in this case, is the psychological makeup of people and
characters; often ordinary characters who nonetheless have very complex
psychologies and personalities and behavioral dysfunctions.
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The use of computer animation allows us to see the world through the “looking glass,” as
Landreth describes it, of psycho-realism in which characters wear the internal as physical
wounds, visibly betraying their personal issues and psychological baggage.
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Ryan Larkin, the ostensible subject of Landreth’s film, is living as a panhandler in
Montreal. This setting belies Larkin’s background as the once rising-star of the National
Film Board of Canada’s animation unit where, under the mentorship of Norman
McLaren, he made the Oscar-nominated short film Walking (1969) at the age of just
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twenty-five. Larkin, unable to deal with the pressure of his early success and his
subsequent creative block, succumbed to alcohol and cocaine addiction in the 1970s and
by the time Landreth interviews him for this film he is living in poverty in a mission
house. Ryan is animated as a decimated figure, battered by years of substance abuse and
still bearing the scars of his artist’s block. His head is notable as much for what is absent
as what is present. Most of his skull is missing and his face is represented by a few key
features, a pair of round glasses and a forelock of gray hair (see figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6: Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004)
Various computer effects are used to further convey the subjectivity of both Ryan
and Landreth beyond establishing the seemingly permanent psychological scars they
carry from their respective pasts. In the opening of the film as Landreth talks of his fear
of personal failure his head is smothered by swathes of colored threads that wrap around
him like bandages. This device is used later in the film to convey Ryan’s loss of
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creativity. Several scenes later, Derek Lamb, with whom Ryan worked at the Film
Board, describes the flush of ideas that came with Ryan’s early cocaine abuse and the
subsequent cessation of that flow as Ryan’s narcotics consumption increased in a
desperate bid to recapture those first moments of altered perception and heightened
productivity. As Derek talks about “every artist’s worst fear” the colored threads of
artistic failure wrap around the body of a young Ryan, a figure we had previously seen
joyously dancing, superimposed into Ryan’s last film, made in 1971. The animated
bandages of creative strangulation convey Ryan’s plight, and Chris’s fears for a similar
fate, in a way that live action could not and, furthermore, allow us to imagine this fear
through a visualization that is far more evocative than Derek’s commentary. Moreover,
the tools of computer animation, which is able to create these threads as growing
organically out of the human figure as a natural extension of both body and psyche, are
particularly suited to this task.
In one notable scene Landreth confronts Ryan over his alcoholism. Throughout
the film we see Ryan sipping from a thermos flask that repeatedly reaches out to him with
small, waving hands demanding his attention. When Landreth raises Ryan’s alcohol
addiction the symbolism of these little hands becomes apparent as a metaphor for the
hold this substance has over Ryan. As Landreth broaches the issue of Ryan’s alcohol
consumption a ‘halo’ of fluorescent, flickering light appears above his head. This
slightly precarious-looking contraption is attached to Landreth via two metal rods and
reveals his saintly, yet misguided, intentions. During the twenty-second pause that
follows the background becomes distorted, an effect created using the paint effects
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function in the animation software program Maya. The background becomes
increasingly less defined, like paint coalescing on a canvas, until Ryan eventually, and
explosively, responds to Landreth’s interfering. Ryan’s head fragments into angry, spiky
tendrils, Landreth’s halo flickers and dies, and we see a poster behind Ryan melt into a
Dali-esque puddle that drips down the wall as the world around him disintegrates.
Ryan is an intriguing combination of insider and outsider perspectives of
subjectivity. Landreth is representing himself, as well as Ryan, and he admits towards
the end of the film that his concern for Ryan is as much to do with his issues with his own
mother’s death from alcoholism as it is about Ryan’s addiction. Furthermore, Landreth
clearly projects his own fears and baggage onto Ryan, as is indicated by the several
sequences involving the smothering threads of failed creativity. However, there are also
two moments in the film where we are afforded Ryan’s interpretation through the
animation of the sketches he draws of the two other interviewees, Derek Lamb and his
ex-partner Felicity Fanjoy. Ryan’s sketches were used to create 3D models that are
incorporated into the world of the film, yet remain distinct from it through their different
visual style. These moving sketches reveal Ryan’s affection for these two people who
played such significant roles in his past. Yet, they also work to emphasize that the film is
about both Ryan and Chris Landreth as these are the two characters whose subjectivity is
revealed through the computer generated “psycho-realism.” No such insight is provided
into the psyches of Felicity and Derek, whose likenesses remain sketchy and are not filled
out. In contrast to this, our understanding of Ryan and Chris is facilitated by the
juxtaposition of the realistic, or iconic, and symbolic as well as that between the
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indexicality of the soundtrack and the constructed nature of the images. The computer-
animated manifestations of the characters’ psychology become an animated excess that is
painted on a canvas of realism. Through this excess, and the marriage of animated image
and documentary sound, we begin to understand the inner worlds of both Ryan Larkin
and Chris Landreth.
Landreth is aware that his interpretation of Ryan’s subjectivity is heavy with the
baggage of his own worldview and experiences when he cites a favorite quote that “we
don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
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This highlights the
epistemological complexity of the films discussed in this section and reminds us that
while these films may be about subjectivity they are often not autobiographical or first-
personal accounts. In most of the films examined above the animation is created by
someone other than those whose subjectivity is being conveyed. A is for Austism is
somewhat of an exception as the drawings are created by autistic people and some of the
sections of the film are animated by Daniel Sellers, the boy who likes to draw trains, in
collaboration with the film’s director Tim Webb. Similarly, Ryan conveys both the
filmmaker’s and the subject’s psychological make-up, although it is ostensibly Ryan
Larkin and his subjectivity that is the focus of the film. It is important to acknowledge,
then, the externalism of these animated interpretations. This adds another layer of
subjectivity to the films because not only are we being offered an insight into someone
else’s mental experiences, but also into a filmmaker or animator’s interpretation of that
experience. The subjectivity is thus once removed, filtered through someone else’s
interpretation.
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While these films evidence an epistemological shift in documentary from the
world out there, of shared observable experience, to the world in here, of personal
subjective experience, it is important to remember that our knowledge of that internal
world is mediated by both the documentary and its creator. Furthermore, our
interpretation of the symbolism in these films is inflected by our own subjectivity, as the
quote cited by Landreth, that we see things as we are, indicates. Peirce emphasized the
importance of the interpretant in the symbolic, thus these types of signs only come to
have meaning through our understanding of it as having that meaning. As well as being
culturally determined, symbolic meaning is also defined by our own attitudes and
experiences. Ronald Burnett echoes this with his insistence on the creativity involved in
viewing images and the importance of our individuality in interpreting the meaning of the
visual.
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Animation, and symbolic animation in particular, allows us to project ourselves
into an image and more readily imagine what it is like to experience someone else’s
internal world through our objective and subjective understanding of what the symbolism
means. In so doing we are enacting the common sense response to the philosophical
problem of knowledge of other minds, in our presumption that other people have mental
states that are similar to our own. While we may not know what it is like to have autism
or suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, we are able to imagine what that state is like by
extrapolating from our own experiences and emotions, which we connect to those being
conveyed on screen.

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Image and Text: Animated Stream of Consciousness
Jonathan Hodgson’s short film Feeling My Way (1997) prompts us to imagine a
far more everyday and relatable state of mind, that of the mental meanderings and stream
of consciousness that accompany a regular and uneventful routine. The film combines
animation with live-action footage of Hodgson’s daily walk to work through London and
offers an insight into his train of thought as he treads his familiar route. The combination
of live-action and animation emphasizes the evocative potential of the latter as our access
to Hodgson’s mental state is enabled by the addition to the original footage of his hand-
drawn images and words. In Feeling My Way the use of animation allows us to quite
specifically know what Hodgson was thinking and feeling as he walked through London.
Thus, the film becomes a documentary of his thought processes and demonstrates
animation’s potential to shift the evidential realm of documentary from the world outside
to the world inside.
Hodgson used an animation process called xerography to create Feeling My Way.
He filmed the point-of-view footage of his walk on Hi8 video and then digitized this
footage using an Amiga computer. After roughly editing this material, the individual
frames were printed out on paper, onto which Hodgson could add his hand drawn images
and words. These sheets were then shot on 35mm to produce the final film. Hodgson’s
choice to digitize only every other frame of the original footage helped “marry the
animated quality of the drawings with live action” and the grainy, hazy quality of the
treated video footage adds to the atmosphere of the piece.
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Instead of the first-person, revelatory testimony heard in the other films discussed
in this chapter, Hodgson’s drawn musings are accompanied by the diegetic noises of the
bustling city and the sound of his regular paced footsteps pounding the pavement lends
the film a rhythmic quality. Through the xerography process Hodgson is able to
communicate what he was thinking on his morning walk without the need for a
voiceover. Thus we quickly learn that this is morning time (from the text “8 24” drawn
on top of the image of a sidewalk soon after we walk out of a house and onto the street)
and that we are on the way to a meeting (from the text “meeting starts at 9am”). We also
gather that Hodgson is not too bothered about this meeting from the text “so what?”
inscribed on the screen as the camera pans up to capture the dappled morning light
filtering through the leaf-filled branches of a large oak tree. This text-image combination
sets the tone of the film, which plays like snippets of a daydream that is both interrupted
and inspired by urban life. At one point we walk past a ringing telephone and realize the
sound must have acted as a reminder to Hodgson when we see the text “ring ring” and
then “ring Simon” superimposed on the live action image of a phone booth. Later we
hear Eastern European folk music and the script “Budapest” scrawls across the screen
from right to left. Not only does this allow us to know what Hodgson thought upon
hearing these noises, but it also evokes our own experiences of how sensorial stimulation
can nudge a memory of forgotten tasks or once-visited places.
Hodgson’s written embellishments range from the mundane to the profound.
Double yellow lines painted in the gutter prompt the thought “no parking,” a simple
verbalization of the meaning of these road markings. The word “ESCAPE” written over
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a busy street thronging with pedestrians and an earlier moment marking a quiet park as a
“clear spot” indicate Hodgson’s value of peace and quiet. As he walks through Soho he
ponders “is that all there is.” This linkage between perception and contemplation is
illustrated in one sequence where Hodgson walks through Kings Cross train station. Just
prior to entering the station he passes a homeless man lying in the street. Across this
image we see the words “dead… or alive?” Subsequently, as we make our way through
the busy rail terminal, the figures of several commuters are picked out in a chalky white
outline with either “DEAD” or “ALIVE” written on their body in white text. By the time
we exit the station the bodies of all those surrounding us are superimposed with the
roughly drawn outlines of the human skeleton, as if Hodgson is surrounded by the living
dead (see figure 4.7). This whimsical and witty attitude characterizes the film. A cat
sitting behind a widow becomes “the family prisoner,” the face of a passerby is scrawled
with a mustache and glasses, and poles of scaffolding evoke a “parallel universe” replete
with UFOs flying off into the distance.
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Figure 4.7: Feeling My Way (Jonathan Hodgson, 1997)

Hodgson superimposes the live action footage with both images and words,
however it is the latter that gives us most insight into his train of thought. In this chapter,
I have been discussing the symbolic potential of animation to evoke the subjective and
written language is itself a system of communication that depends on symbolism to
convey meaning. Words, as signs, come to represent objects or ideas only through
linguistic convention. As such, words must be read and processed mentally in order for
their meaning to be understood. Feeling My Way draws attention to the difference in
how we process images and words and yet, as William J. Mitchell points out, there is
difficulty in defining the difference between the two.
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While he denies this implies there
is not a significant difference, he suggests “the word/ image difference is not likely to be
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definitively stabilized by any single pair of defining terms or any static binary
opposition.” Instead he conceives word and image as a dialectic trope or “figurative
condensation of a whole set of relations and distinctions, that crops up in aesthetics,
semiotics, accounts of perception, cognition, and communication, and analyses of
media.” As such word/image “resists stabilization as a binary opposition, shifting and
transforming itself from one conceptual level to another, and shuttles between relations of
contrariety and identity, difference and sameness.”
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Thinking of the relationship
between word and image as dialectic can help us understand how the combination of
iconic/indexical filmed images and written text in Feeling My Way comes to evoke
Hodgson’s train of thought. The difference between word and image in the film is,
indeed, not one of simple opposition, but one of mutual enhancement that enriches our
understanding of Hodgson’s perspective.
Elsewhere Mitchell has noted “pictures, when combined with labels, can be used
like declarative sentences to make assertions which are either true or false.”
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This
echoes Susan Sontag’s comments that a photograph can become faked through the
addition of a false caption.
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Roland Barthes has even gone so far to describe the text of
the photographic caption as “parasitic” on the image, a reversal from a historically earlier
relationship between text and image where the latter would clarify and elucidate the
former.
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When appended to a photograph, the text’s role is “one of making explicit, of
providing a stress” and “simply amplifying a set of connotations already given in the
photograph.”
89
Furthermore, Barthes claims the closer, spatially, a caption is to an image
the more it “appears to duplicate the image, that is, to be included in its denotation.”
90

257
Hodgson destabilizes this traditional relationship between the photographic and its label.
Whereas captions have historically been used to bolster a photograph’s factual status and
to identify its contents, in Feeling My Way the ‘captions’ are labels of expression rather
than declaration. Barthes hints at the potential for photographic captions to go beyond
the “parasitic,” when he notes that sometimes the text “produces (invents) an entirely new
signified which is retroactively projected into the image.”
91
We can think of the text in
Feeling My Way as working in this way. Rather than attesting to the realness or fakeness
of the underlying video footage or identifying objects or places, Hodgson’s written words
indicate how the external world triggers the thoughts and contemplations that make up
our internal world. As such, these handwritten words project a meaning into the
photographic-based moving images, encouraging us to see a connotative meaning in the
original images that is not immediately apparent through their denotation.
The use and form of the text in Feeling My Way contests Ann Marie Seward
Barry’s claim that “words represent an artificially imposed intellectual system removed
from primal feeling.”
92
Hodgson’s text becomes a way to access the subjective and is far
from the cold, impersonal words described by Barry. Words, especially in the
handwritten form, can be expressive and, in this film, be thought of as a form of
inscription. Handwriting is as unique to a person as their drawing style and can be a way
of expressing individuality. The text in Feeling My Way becomes a form of drawing; it
moves across and on the screen and takes on the properties of expressive animation rather
than the impersonal words of a typeface.
258
The superimposition of signs in the form of animated images and text that must be
read and processed onto images that are clearly recognizable as the objects they represent
asks us to continuously negotiate between reading iconic (and indexical) and symbolic
signs. This dual process highlights the notion that the symbolic gives access to
subjectivity and inner worlds, whereas the iconic and indexical represent the objective
and external. Thus, it is the animated elements of Hodgson’s film that allow us access to
his state of mind on his walk to work that morning. It is these that make this a
documentary of the internal, rather than a documentary of the external. Furthermore, this
film exemplifies a point made regarding all the films discussed in this chapter, that the
animation is more than a simple illustration of what we hear on the soundtrack, but rather
that the animation comes to gain meaning and facilitate knowledge and understanding
through its symbolic potential. It is the case that Hodgson could attempt to explain via a
voice-over that when he walked through Kings Cross train station he imagined
commuters as walking skeletons, labeled with their own mortal potential. Animation,
however, can convey this imagination in but a couple of seconds, rather than the lengthy
verbal explanation that would have been required to express a similar sense. Moreover, I
would suggest that animation conveys this sense much more effectively, and in a way
that allows us to more readily imagine another person’s subjectivity, than could a verbal
explanation.

259
Conclusion
In the introduction to this chapter I discussed how we process images and words
differently and quoted Ann Marie Seward Barry suggesting written and oral forms of
language must be cognitively processed whereas pictures are perceived in the same way
as direct experience. This implies that pictures are simple and easily understood and, as
Alex Potts notes, “there is a long tradition of cultural common sense that considers the
visual image to be somehow more natural, offering up a replica of reality rather than a
conventionally coded representation of it in its language.”
93
However, the films
discussed in this chapter complicate the notion of any simple binary between images and
words. In many of the examples, the animated imagery must be processed and
understood, its symbolism de-coded in a process through which we relate our own
experiences to those being represented on screen and, hence, more readily imagine the
subjectivity of another person. We do not, necessarily, simply perceive these symbolic
animated images in the same way we perceive direct experience, for animation allows the
creation of a visual world that is purposely contrasted, visually and spatially, to the world
in which we live. The use of metamorphosis, repetition, expressive hand-created
techniques such as painting and drawing and computer-generated imagery create visual
worlds that do not resemble reality. Thus, it is fair to assume that we will perceive and
process these images differently to the way we perceive direct experience of reality.
The films discussed here refute the idea that we can simply perceive images
without also having to process and understand them. However, they also make the case
that some types of imagery, namely expressive and symbolic animated imagery, are
260
particularly suitable for conveying the subjective. Furthermore, the dialectic of the
animated and the documentary enhances this expression of subjectivity. The contrast and
interplay between the symbolic and the iconic/ indexical allows us to imagine what it is
like to live in the world from someone else’s physical and mental perspective. The
specificity of the indexical elements of these films, such as the spoken testimony and
filmed images works in a dialectic relationship with the generality of the symbolic
animation. These elements are not binary opposites, but instead work together and ask us
to negotiate the push-and-pull between the world we know, the world we feel and the
world we can imagine. Animation is not merely making up for an absence of visually
indexical material. Rather, as Hodgson’s film so astutely shows, the animation is itself
an excess that goes beyond simple substitution. This excess, in the form of style and
expression and symbolism, must be decoded and understood, in relation to cultural
conventions and personal experience, as well as in relation to the other, more
conventional documentary elements in the film. This complex processing works to evoke
our imagination and allows us to position ourselves in the inner worlds of the
documentary subjects.
Bill Nichols claims the performative mode of documentary evidences an
epistemological shift. In these films “realist epistemology comes under question and
under siege” and “realism finds itself deferred, dispersed, interrupted and postponed.”
94
I
suggest that interpretive animated documentaries take this epistemological shift further.
They demonstrate a shift of documentary focus from the world out there to the world in
here. Furthermore, they reveal the limitations of both verbal recounting and indexical
261
imagery alone at conveying this subjectivity. In so doing expressive, symbolic animation
shows itself to be a privileged tool for accessing and revealing the privileged knowledge
of someone else’s subjectivity.

262
Chapter IV Endnotes

1
Renov, The Subject of Documentary, xvii.

2
Nichls, Blurred Boundaries, 97.

3
Ibid., 94.

4
Ibid., 101.

5
See Renov, The Subject of Documentary.

6
Ibid., 177.

7
Ibid.

8
Searle, Mind, Language and Society, 42.

9
Ibid., 43.

10
Hyslop, “Other Minds.”

11
See Hyslop.

12
Forrester, The Psychology of the Image, 2.

13
Ibid., 24.

14
Ibid., 23.

15
Ibid., 25.

16
Although Joanna Bouldin broaches this subject in her PhD thesis, “The Animated and the
Actual: Toward a Theory of Animation, Live-Action, and Everyday Life.”

17
Renov, “Animation: Documentary’s Imaginary Signifier.”

18
Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality, 89.

19
Wells, Understanding Animation, 27. Emphases in original.

20
Ibid., 122.

21
Ibid.

22
McCloud, Understanding Comics, 49.

263

23
Berger, Ways of Seeing, 7.

24
Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image and Manipulation in Visual Communication, 75.
25
Ibid., 78.

26
Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 153.

27
McCloud, 30.

28
Ibid.

29
Power, “Character Animation and the Embodied Mind-Brain,” 28. See chapter three for an
explication of the rotoshop method of animation.

30
Power, 40.

31
Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them, 252.

32
Ibid.

33
Elkins, The Domain of Images, 41, and On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, chapter 8.
34
Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, 253.

35
Wells, Understanding Animation, 122.

36
Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 100.

37
Oxford English Dictionary Online s.v. “evoke,” http://dictionary.oed.com./ (accessed March
15, 2009).

38
Nichols Blurred Boundaries, 99, 100.

39
Ibid., 101.

40
Oxford English Dictionary Online s.v. “evocation,” http://dictionary.oed.com./ (accessed
March 15, 2009).

41
Aristotle, De Anima, 428a.

42
Oxford English Dictionary Online s.v. “imagination,” http://dictionary.oed.com./ (accessed
March 15, 2009). My emphasis.

43
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy s.v. "imagination," http://www.credoreference.com.
libproxy.usc.edu/entry/828219 (accessed March 16, 2009).

44
Thomas, “Imagination.”

264

45
See Gaut “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film,” 262, and, Walton Mimesis as Make-
Believe and “On Pictures and Photographs.”

46
McCloud, 35-36.

47
Peirce, Peirce on Signs, 240.

48
Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 83.

49
McCloud, 27.

50
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 458.

51
Ibid., 460.

52
Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality, 91.

53
Sofian, “Documentary Animation: The Evolution of a Hybrid Medium.”

54
Ibid.

55
Ibid.

56
Sheila M. Sofian, e-mail message to author, March 19, 2009.

57
Sofian, “Documentary Animation.”

58
Sheila M. Sofian, e-mail message to author, August 22, 2008.

59
Wells, Understanding Animation, 69; Eisenstein, 21.

60
Wells, Understanding Animation, 69.

61
Ibid.

62
Bukatman, “Taking Shape: Morphing and the Performance of Self,” 226.

63
Eisenstein, 21.

64
Wells, 69.

65
Sobchack, “Introduction,” in Meta-Morphing, xiv.

66
Ibid., xvi.

265

67
Klein, “Animation and Animorphs,” 22.

68
Ibid.

69
Ibid., 24.

70
http://mosaicfilms.com/2007/11/animated-minds-channel-4-2003.php (accessed March 23,
2009).

71
Wells, 122. Emphases in original.

72
Wells, 22.

73
Arnall, “A is for Autism.”

74
Ward, 93. The National Autistic Society, “Autism, What is it?”

75
Arnall.

76
Ibid.

77
Wells, 124-25.

78
Singer, “Landreth on Ryan.”

79
Ibid.

80
Landreth, “Commentary.”

81
Landreth, “Commentary.”

82
Burnett, How Images Think, 15.

83
Hodgson, “Jonathan Hodgson,” 64-65.

84
Mitchell, “Word and Image,” 55.

85
Ibid., 57.

86
Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, 192.

87
Sontag, On Photography, 86.

88
Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message,’ 25.

89
Ibid., 27.

266

90
Ibid., 26.

91
Ibid., 27.

92
Barry, 75.

93
Potts, “Sign,” 24.

94
Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 97.
267
CHAPTER V
REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING: ANIMATED MEDIATIONS OF THE
PAST

Introduction
In Everything’s For You (1989) filmmaker Abraham Ravett constructs a compilation of
photographic-based media in his search to understand his deceased father. Fragments of
images flit and flicker on the screen, which often splits to display multiple versions of the
same image. Items from the Ravetts’ personal archive are shown along with those from
the official archive of public history and, as such, family photographs – some of them
recently discovered – appear juxtaposed with footage from the Lodz ghetto, where
Ravett’s father was interned with his previous wife and children before being sent to
Auschwitz. We see observational documentary film of Ravett interacting with his young
son as well as footage of interviews with his father made before his death over a decade
earlier. All of these image sources attest to the significance of the relationship between
photographic media and memory as a way of accessing the past.
There are, however, several moments in the film where Ravett represents
remembered events not with found or newly made photographs or film, but through
animation.
1
These animated sections stand out amongst the collage of photographic-
based, indexical archive media. With the accepted correspondence between photography
and the past, what place does animation have in a film of personal history? The three
events from Ravett’s childhood conveyed through simple, line-drawn animation are ones
that took on great significance as he grew up. As a child he broke the lock on a door and
was beaten; he failed to understand the significance of one potato to his father; or why he
268
would not “wait like other people” in line. These events haunt Ravett and the memories
have become manifestations of the emotional distance he felt from his father while he
was alive. The animated sections in the film are fragments of his own past that he cannot
understand, moments when his father’s behavior made no sense. Accordingly, these
moments aesthetically stand out from the rest of the film. This is a film of fragments. A
fragmented history of events half-remembered, the significance of which Ravett is still
struggling to comprehend in order that he might know himself. With his repeated mantra,
“Pop, I was looking for you,” Ravett is searching to understand his father, and thus
himself, through a complex interweaving of images and sounds.
Marita Sturken has observed that “photographs are often perceived to embody
memory.”
2
Similarly, Esther Leslie notes, after Walter Benjamin, that photography is
understood to be both mimetic and mnemic.
3
Photographic media seems to provide
direct access to the past because of the indexical relationship between the image and the
pro-filmic. Indeed, this is the foundational assumption of Roland Barthes final work,
Camera Lucida, in which he searches through old photographs for the essence, or noeme,
of his deceased mother.
4
The link between photography and the past has been much
theorized, and Benjamin’s oft-quoted words about the accessibility of history indicate a
connection between photography and an otherwise elusive past when he tells us “the true
image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the
moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.”
5
Photography, through images
that capture the flash of an instant flitting by, provides a record of a moment that would
otherwise pass by never to be seen or experienced again.
269
Furthermore, Barthes, Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer have all influentially
connected photography and death. Barthes sought death in every photograph of himself
and in each case he claims “death is the eidos of that photograph.”
6
Eduardo Cadava, in
his analysis of Benjamin’s work on photography and history, notes “there can be no
[photographic] image that is not also an image of death.”
7
For Cadava, as for Barthes, the
photograph is always already haunted by death, even if its subject is still alive. “In
photographing someone, we know that the photograph will survive him – it begins, even
during his life, to circulate without him, figuring and anticipating his death each time it is
looked at.”
8
In creating a snapshot of time, photographs provide permanent visible
evidence of a moment that is instantly past. Likewise, film and video enable us to play
back a finite period that is, as soon as it is filmed, historical. Both moving and still
images have a capacity, in their ability to replay the past, to revive and reanimate the
temporal instant and physical bodies that have long since been lost to us. In their
capacity to play with time, these media remind us of the ephemerality of our own
existence.
The fragmented presentation of images of the past in Everything’s For You begins
to suggest that history, be it personal or collective, can never be completely grasped or
understood. As Janet Walker points out, the photographic evidence in this film attests
“contrarily, to all we do not know and/or to what we do know but cannot quite
comprehend or accept.”
9
Indeed, the film turns our expectations of photographic media
on its head and “undermines any ‘Eureka!’ experience that might be had” in relation to
these images.
10
This echoes the underlying sentiments of Benjamin’s claim that we can
270
never recognize the past as it really was, but can only every appropriate “a memory as it
flashes up in a moment of danger.”
11
Ravett’s compilation tells us that the photographic
does not guarantee unfettered access to the past, despite its mimetic, indexical nature.
The temporal nature of the index, after all, is finite and limited and this sign alone, while
it may have a physical connection with a historical moment, cannot offer unconditional
knowledge of the past.
This grappling with the (in)accessibility of history is emphasized and
consolidated, I would argue, by the use of animation in Everything’s For You.
Particularly so because the animated sequences are of the incidents in Ravett’s childhood
that he still struggles to understand and put into the context of his father’s history and the
events he lived through before Ravett’s birth. In choosing to animate these memories
Ravett is suggesting that no matter how much digging he does in personal and public
archives and no matter how much traditional archival material he finds, he will never be
able to fully understand or integrate these memories into his own personal history. This
is, in itself, a kind of reconciliation with past events and the behavior of his father. By
acknowledging the incomprehensibility of the past and the unknowability of past events,
Ravett suggests a different kind of coming to terms with history. One that does not entail
complete knowledge of the causes and effects of past events.
Animation, then, can be seen as an alternative way of ‘accessing’ the past.
Through animating personal, collective and post- memories, this aesthetic approach
becomes a way to comment on the ephemeral nature of both history and memory.
12
Just
as the first chapter of this dissertation suggests that the history of the animated
271
documentary is not a clear genealogical line from single origin to sole teleological heir,
the present chapter suggests how the animated documentary itself can be a medium for
exploration of a fragmented past of forgotten, perplexing, yet often formative memories.
In order to consider this suggestion the current chapter will examine autobiographical
animated documentaries made from a first-person perspective. Michael Renov informs us
that, according to literary studies, “autobiography is a form of personal writing that is
referential (that is, imbued with history), mainly retrospective (though the temporality of
the telling may be quite complex), and in which the author, the narrator, and the
protagonist are identical.”
13
While Renov, in his study of subjective, autobiographical
documentary film and video is asking “what differences arise when the autobiographer
chooses film, video, or the Internet [rather than the written word] for her mode of
production,”
14
I am primarily concerned with the differences that arise when the
autobiographer chooses animation as a mode of self-inscription.
In Drawn From Memory (1998) Paul Fierlinger uses animation to construct a
memoir of a fragmented childhood. Fierlinger was born in Japan to Czechoslovakian
diplomat parents. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Fierlingers moved to
New York and young Paul spent his childhood farmed out to various families in rural
north eastern America while his father was preoccupied with official state business. As
his father climbed the ranks of Czech political life, Paul became more estranged from his
parents. The return of the family to Czechoslovakia, a country to which Paul had never
been and whose language he did not speak, was brought about by the end of the Second
World War and the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Paul, yearning for his idyllic
272
former life in the United States, was sent to a harsh boarding school and came to realize
that, no matter how hard he tried to rebel against the regime, his family name would
always award him special treatment and his acts of rebellion would become meaningless.
Fierlinger’s autobiographical account of his childhood and his alienation from his
parents and national culture is drawn using traditional cel-animation combined with
watercolor backgrounds and pencil and charcoal sketches. This hand drawn aesthetic
accentuates the film’s subjectivity and enables Fierlinger to lay claim to the ownership of
these particular memories. The situated and localized nature of the recollections is
enhanced by Fierlinger’s voice-over in which he recounts in the first person the story of
his life. There are moments throughout the film when family photographs are inserted
into the animated canvas. We see Paul as a young boy with his nanny in Japan. Later we
see a still image of the foreboding boarding school he attended in Czechoslovakia and
where he was beaten for his academic shortcomings. Through the photos we see of Paul
during the course of the film we can witness the physical changes that take him from
fresh-faced young boy in Japan to the bearded Bohemian who escaped Czechoslovakia to
Western Europe, and then America, on forged papers. I would suggest, however, that it
is the use of animation that enables us to feel a particular connection to the personal
narrative of the film. The very fact that animation is a constructed, subjective medium
that is, in this case, created by the hand of the autobiographer encourages us to connect to
the film’s narrative and narrator. This is a story being told from the inside, from the
position of personal subjective experience, and as such animation becomes an apposite
tool of communication.
273
The preceding chapters have advanced the argument that animated documentaries
articulate an epistemological shift in documentary from the world out there of observable
events and behavior that it is possible to eyewitness to the world in here of personal lived
experience that is not necessarily physically manifested in a way that can be seen and,
hence, understood. The films discussed in the previous chapter, however, raised
particular representational and philosophical questions because the filmmaker/ animator
was most often not the person whose subjectivity was being portrayed. In contrast, the
films discussed in this current chapter, like Drawn From Memory, use animation as a
means of expressing their own subjectivity. Even in the one example discussed below
where the autobiographer is not also the filmmaker (Silence), she still had creative input
into the film and her self-written recollections and reflections form the basis of its
soundtrack.
Furthermore, in these films animation becomes an archeological tool for
exploring ones own past. Thus, unlike the films discussed in chapter three that did not,
for the most part, temporally situate the personal stories of the interviewees, these films
seek to firmly ensconce the personal in a historical context. The accounts given by the
residents of the retirement community in Backseat Bingo and the interviewees in
Aardman’s claymations, for example, do not work to situate the documentary subjects in
a specific, locatable time or place. The interviewees’ testimonies do not engage with the
broader social context in a way that allows us to definitively situate them in history. In
contrast, the meaning of the stories being told in the films discussed in the current chapter
is inextricably bound up with events and cultures in which they took place. Fierlinger’s
274
deeply subjective film resonates within the political history of the latter half of the
twentieth century. Animation, as well as revealing the subjectivity of the films’ subjects,
also becomes a means to draw them into a broader social, political and cultural history.
The films examined in this chapter can be thought of as participating in two
cultural and intellectual ‘booms’ witnessed at the end of the twentieth and beginning of
the twenty-first centuries – that of the turn towards the autobiographical in documentary
filmmaking and the growth of memory studies as a discrete area of interdisciplinary study
encompassing fields such as literary studies, history, and cultural and media studies.
Both developments occurred independently of each other in media practice and academe.
They can, however, be understood as conceptually deeply connected. Susannah Radstone
and Katherine Hodgkin note that it is frequently accepted that “memory makes us,” and
cite Fentress and Wickham’s statement that “a study of the way we remember is a study
of the way we are.”
15
They also note that “since early modern times, memory has been
conceived of as a storage space and as an internal writing.”
16
These observations suggest
memory and the process of self-inscription are intrinsically linked and entailed by the
knowledge of personal identity.
These twin intellectual and cultural booms can also be seen as a reaction to
hegemonic systems of power. In documentary production and distribution from the mid-
1970s “16 mm film, consumer-grade video, and the Internet have provided unique and
increasingly accessible platforms for self-expression while opening up new audience
frontiers.”
17
This turn towards self-inscription in documentary, as discussed in the
introduction to Chapter Four, was socially and historically determined and was bound up
275
with activist movements that founded the political in the personal. Thus, by the 1990s
autobiographical, personal and subjective filmmaking had become a means to protest
political and social injustice and inequality.
18
While it took decades of technical
development to open up filmmaking to non-privileged makers, animation has always
been more accessible. The nature of animation’s production process and the potential
cheapness of tools and materials in comparison to film mean the medium has often been
adopted by those working outside the mainstream. Antonia Lant observes, for example,
that the practicalities of animation production are far more workable for women with
families than the film industry.
19
Similarly, Paul Wells points out that women animators
have been attracted to independent animation production because its aesthetic potential
“resists the inherently masculine language of the live-action arena, and the most
dominant codes of orthodox hyper-realist animation [i.e. Disney and other major studio
animation] which also use its vocabulary.”
20
Filmmaking practices, and animation in
particular, have the potential to offer ways of challenging hegemonic power relations,
particularly those regarding gender.
Radstone and Hodgkin have noted that the influence of post-structuralism and
postmodernism on contemporary memory studies means that memory has been used “to
destabilize the authority of the ‘grand narratives’ with which History has become
associated.”
21
Furthermore, Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead have observed that
“memory is often opposed to the hegemony of history” and that it “serves as a therapeutic
alternative to historical discourse.”
22
While, as Marita Sturken points out, it is hard to
generalize the practice of history-making we can still think of history “as a narrative that
276
has in some way been sanctioned or valorized by institutional frameworks or publishing
enterprises.”
23
Memory, precisely because it is personal and locally situated, has the
contestational potential to counter official histories. As such, memory has gained the
positive associations of subjectivity in contrast to the negative qualities of “public” and
“objectivity” that have become associated with history.
24

The contestational potential of memory is particularly apposite for groups and
individuals that have traditionally been left out of official histories. Indeed, these are
often the same groups and individuals who sought to redress social and political
imbalance through autobiographical and subjective filmmaking. Precisely because
“public media and official archives memorialize the experiences of the powerful … it has
… been necessary to turn to alternative archives … to hear the voices of …
disenfranchised groups.”
25
Autobiography, then, can be seen as a way of intervening in
official history by way of invoking personal memories and exploring and creating
‘alternative archives.’ By inserting the self into the social and the personal into the
public, autobiographical filmmaking and animation are ways of refiguring the past from a
locally situated perspective. As such, autobiographical media has the potential to be a
powerful tool for (re-/de-)constructing our picture of the social, historical world.
Over the following pages, I will explore how animation in particular enables this
refiguring. Furthermore, I will be addressing how the medium-specificity of animation
can convey questions regarding forgetting and remembering and knowing and not-
knowing the past. Animation, by the nature of its construction and creation, necessarily
presents a subjective interpretation of its subject matter and, as such, marks a trenchant
277
intervention into the discourses of autobiography, memory and history discussed above.
As such, animation can be seen as a tool by which self-identity can be explored and
understood. Learned By Heart (Rimminen and Takala, 2007) and Irinka and Sandrinka
(Stoïanov, 2007) both animate the self in the context of a larger (national, familial)
history. Silence (Bringas and Yadin, 1998) and Waltz With Bashir (Folman, 2008)
confront an unspoken and forgotten traumatic past. All of these films use the formal and
aesthetic ‘excess’ of animation as a means of accessing the now absent past and as a way
of understanding personal identity. As such, these films further evince the animated
documentary’s dialectical evocation of an epistemological shift from exteriority to the
subjective.

(Dis)continuities: The Self in History
Nicola King tells us that “it is commonly accepted that identity, or a sense of self, is
constructed by and through narrative.”
26
Furthermore, as influentially attested by John
Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, memory is often understood as
playing an important role in the formation of personal identity. For Locke, our identity is
dictated by our consciousness, which in turn is formed by ideas prompted by sensation
and experience. Memory, importantly, allows us to recall earlier ideas and, as such,
affords a continuity of consciousness and a coherent sense of personal identity. Marita
Sturken demonstrates the contemporary relevance of this Enlightenment understanding of
the function of memory in her study of late-twentieth-century American culture when she
points out that “memory establishes life’s continuity; it gives meaning to the present, as
278
each moment is constituted by the past. As the means by which we remember who we
are, memory provides the very core of identity.”
27
By telling stories of our past and
memorializing personal history we can, therefore, come to understand and know
ourselves.
Learned By Heart and Irinka and Sandrinka suggest that it is not only our own
memories, but also collective memory and postmemory that constitute personal identity.
In Learned By Heart filmmaker Marjut Rimminen explores her memories of growing up
in post-Second-World-War Finland. French animator Sandrine Stoïanov’s animated
collage inspired by her elderly aunt’s memories of a childhood lived during and after the
collapse of the Russian monarchy is imbued with her own recollections of juvenile
imaginings of a fairy-tale Russia. Both Rimminen and Stoïanov draw themselves within
the context of a broader political and social history that is channeled through their own
formative experiences and memories. Rimminen’s identity is bound up with the role
played by women in Finland during and after the War. For Stoïanov the impact of
‘History’ is still being felt as she uncovers her family history. Both films point to the
“gendered and power-laden dynamics of remembering,”
28
and by offering a female
perspective on significant historical events they present an alternative to the male-centric
versions of the past that recount history through the exploits of ‘great men.’
Maurice Halbwachs’s writing on memory counters the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth century philosophical, psychological and literary suggestion that memory is
something that occurs solely within the mind of an individual.
29
In so doing, his work
catalyzed the “recognition of memory as a social, rather than a purely psychological,
279
phenomenon.”
30
Halbwachs “emphasizes the partial and incomplete nature of past
recollections, and he attributes the ability to remember not to internal processes.”
31

Instead, memory for Halbwachs is “socially produced,”
32
and rather than being dependent
on our individual power of recollection of personal experiences is constituted by our
belonging within social groups. “The group, in Halbwachs’s understanding, provides the
individual with a ‘framework’ into which her remembrances are woven.”
33
This suggests
that individual memories only come to have meaning when placed within a collective,
social context.
As well as being distinguished from individual memory, collective memory is
distinct from history. “General history,”
34
as Halbwachs terms it, arises precisely at the
demise of collective memory because the failure of social memory necessitates the
writing down and consolidation of events and facts. “So long as a remembrance
continues to exist, it is useless to set it down in writing or otherwise fix it in memory.”
35

Furthermore, “past events read about in books and taught and learned in schools are
selected, combined, and evaluated in accord with necessities and rules not imposed on the
groups that had through time guarded them as a living trust.”
36
Halbwachs’s contrast of
official history and collective memory suggests that the former only works to distance us
from the experiential reality of the past. Collective memory is constituted by continuity,
whereas official history is necessitated by a break with the past.
Learned By Heart’s thirty minute duration is divided into five chapters that trace a
trajectory of personal development within a national and gendered context. Rimminen’s
journey from infancy to adulthood is intertwined with the cultural and social changes that
280
took place in Finland after the end of the Second World War. The country emerged from
the War “in a schizophrenic state,”
37
psychologically scarred and financially ruined by
battles for independence from the Soviet Union. The film presents the liberating decade
of the 1960s as a healing force where the young post-war baby boomers were freed from
the authoritarian strictures of their parents’ generation that still struggled to come to
terms with the changes wrought by conflict and separation. The film is also an
expression of Rimminen’s memories of the changes in Finland since the 1950s. She
ensconces this history in her own familial experiences and via extracts from her
childhood journals. The film’s chapters are also, importantly, structured around five old
Lutheran hymns that “recall memories of a time when [these songs] were an intimate
element in everyday life.”
38
These hymns are an aural talisman for Rimminen, evoking
the past and returning her to her childhood experiences.
The visual elements in Learned By Heart comprise a collage of different types of
images. Original filmed material is combined with archive materials, including filmed
footage and still images that are presented along with Rimminen’s family photographs.
These photographic-based images are often ‘animated’ and computer manipulation
software is used to bring still images to life and to layer images from different sources.
The way in which images are compiled brings thematic resonance and meaning to the
film. For example, the layering of stock footage of Hitler emphatically delivering a
speech over the wedding portrait of a young couple (whom we later realize are
Rimminen’s parents) articulates the notion that the War destroyed the happiness of
Rimminen’s parents’ generation. Later, images of shells exploding on a battlefield are
281
superimposed on the besuited torso of a male figure. The figure, seen from below, fills
the frame and his domineering presence illustrates “The Fear of Lord’ theme of this third
chapter of the film as well as suggesting that the domestic violence experienced by
Rimminen was a result of the war’s impact on her own father.
39
Furthermore, throughout
the film animation is layered on top of and embedded into this photographic material.
This animation has a hand-drawn and -painted aesthetic despite its cutout style of
character movement also being created with a computer program.
40

There is the air of nostalgia to Learned By Heart. Cutout animation is one of the
medium’s oldest techniques and the earliest extant animated feature, Lotte Reiniger’s The
Adventures of Prince Achmed (Germany, 1926), was created using this method. This
atmosphere of nostalgia is enhanced by the aesthetic qualities of the archival material -
the sepia tones of the photographs and the black and white grainy film. Additionally,
some of the new footage shot for this film is heavily desaturated, only using color to
accentuate particular elements such as the red and white checked cloth that covers the
table in the reconstruction of Rimminen’s childhood home. Furthermore, the sounds of
the traditional Finnish hymns on the soundtrack lend the film a wistful air.
Mieke Bal tells us nostalgia “has often been criticized as unproductive, escapist,
and sentimental. It is considered regressive, romanticizing, the temporal equivalent of
tourism and the search for the picturesque. It has also been conceived as longing for an
idyllic past that never was.”
41
Cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan helps us understand
nostalgia as a reaction to the perception that “changes are occurring too rapidly, spinning
out of control.”
42
Thus, nostalgia is a kind of temporal digging-in of our cultural heels,
282
slowing down the too-fast changes that threaten a loss of control by looking back to a
time that may or may not have existed. At these unsettling moments the status quo often
seems safer than the unknown offered by rapid change.
Leo Spitzer attempts to redeem the much-maligned concept of nostalgia and
suggests it can be seen in a more positive light. He points out that “nostalgic memory
also plays a significant role in the reconstruction and continuity of individual and
collective memory.”
43
We can then perhaps think of nostalgia as a relevant element of
collective memory, which Halbwachs understands as being constituted by continuity as
opposed to official history, which is entailed by the fissures in collective remembering.
Furthermore, the computer manipulation and animation of archival material along with
the superimposition of animated figures into found footage and photographs in Learned
By Heart disrupts any simple understanding of its superficially nostalgic aesthetic as
reactionary or sentimental. In one sequence a girl in a red dress walks into a dancehall
and takes her place amongst the young women waiting to be picked to dance. The girl is
drawn in animation, and in color, on the black and white archive footage of the dancehall
scene (see figure 5.1). This vibrant figure seems at odds with the sepia scene in which
she is placed. She works to both connect us to the past as well as to mark out its temporal
distance. The scene, in which the red-dressed stand-in for Rimminen does not get picked
to dance, also reminds us of the disappointments of teenaged life. As such, the animation
cuts through any easy, nostalgic or romantic reminiscence offered up by the old filmed
footage.
283

Figure 5.1: Learned By Heart (Marjut Rimminen and Päivi Takala, 2007)

Knitting forms a visual motif in Learned By Heart. We often see the young
Rimminen, played by a round-faced blond actress, knitting while observing the world
around her. At the end of “The Fear of Lord” chapter the father’s empty suit is unraveled
and the yarn wound up by aging female hands. This segues into the fourth chapter,
“Schools are out!” in which Rimminen’s own sexual awakening mirrors the emergence of
Finland from years of austerity and hardship. Similarly, her discovery of the opposite sex
and liberation from the overbearing dominance of her father reflects the liberation of
social attitudes towards sex and gender roles. Furthermore, the knitting motif is more
broadly symbolic of Rimminen knitting herself into the history of Finland as remembered
from a specific, gendered position.
284
This is, in part, achieved visually by the insertion of the animated figure, which
represents Rimminen, into the compilation of photographic media. Thus, animation is
one tool that is used to construct continuity between Rimminen’s personal memory and
the collective memory of Finnish women since the Second World War. Furthermore,
these intertwined recollections refigure the importance of women of Finland in the
country’s post-War recovery, a recovery that the film suggests was more hindered than
helped by the male figures of power that are traditionally honored in the annals of history.
The assemblage of the visual elements of the film echoes with the words heard on the
soundtrack from a speech given on Mothers’ Day in 1947. “Finnish women have never
had it easy,” the interlocutor tells us, reminding us that “our mothers are tough” and that
it is the strong women of Finland who have born much of the responsibility for seeing the
country through its hard times.
Marianne Hirsch coined the term ‘postmemory’ to “describe the ways in which
individuals can be haunted by a past that they have not experienced personally but which
has somehow been ‘transferred’ to them, often unconsciously, by family members.”
44

This phenomenon is most often observed in the children of Holocaust survivors, and this
is the focus of Hirsch’s body of work within memory studies. There is, she argues, an
important link between traumatic experience in one generation and the experience of
postmemory in the next because trauma disrupts the continuity of collective memory. A
frequent response of those who have lived through traumatic and catastrophic events is to
not speak of the past and, as such, the “multiple ruptures and radical breaks introduced by
trauma and catastrophe inflect intra-, and inter- and trans-generational inheritance.”
45

285
Children of trauma survivors experience the past as an overwhelming absence, in the
form of silence, and overbearing excess, in the form of the weight of the unspoken past.
As a response to these ruptures and breaks “postmemorial work … strives to
reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial
structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation
and aesthetic expression.”
46
Therefore, the artistic and communicative works created by
the second-generation of survivors of traumatic events become a way of reconnecting
with collective memory. The suffix ‘post-,’ Hirsch points out, “signals more than a
temporal delay and more than a location in an aftermath.”
47
Like the other ‘post-’
intellectual movements and moments of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, such as postmodernism and postcolonialism, postmemory “reflects an uneasy
oscillation between continuity and rupture.”
48
The existence of postmemory work in
itself acknowledges a break with the past, albeit a past that continues to resonate with
those who create the visual, literary and performative responses.
While Hirsch specifically applies the concept of postmemory to the second
generation of survivors of traumatic events such as genocide, in particular children of
Holocaust survivors, I suggest that her theorization of the appropriation of the affective
force of ancestral memory and experience can be applied in other examples of inherited
recollection. In particular, postmemory can shed light on situations in which familial or
social collective memory have been disrupted by the geographical shifts of exile and
emigration. In these situations the ruptures with the past may be less ‘radical’ than with
histories of trauma and devastation, but the separation of a younger generation from the
286
homeland of their parents and grandparents causes a similar fissure in the continuity of
memory and identity formation. Sandrine Stoïanov’s aunt Irene was raised in Russia
during the fall of the monarchy. As Russian nobility, Irene and her mother fled to
Romania while Irene’s father, whom she had not met, remained in exile in France. A
childhood of fissures and separations was compacted by Irene’s transplantation to France
after her mother’s death. In search of her own identity, Stoïanov created Irinka and
Sandrinka based on taped interviews with the elderly aunt whom she barely knew.
Stoïanov uses animation to weave together her aunt’s memories and her own childhood
fantasies of being a young Russian aristocrat. This short film can be thought, therefore,
as a work of postmemory that seeks to connect Stoïanov to the collective memory of pre-
revolutionary Russia, a past from which she has been cleaved by both the political history
of the Soviet Union and the enforced geographical separation experienced by the
previous generations of her family.
Hirsch has suggested that photography, because of its indexical relationship with
reality, is crucial to the conception of postmemory as it relates to the Holocaust.
49
The
power of photography is attested to by Irene’s words at the beginning of Irinka and
Sandrinka. In the opening moments of the film we see a framed black and white
photograph of a mustached man wearing a suit. We hear Irene telling Sandrine that “for
me, my father was a photograph” and that as a child she kissed this photograph goodnight
every evening after saying her prayers. For the young Irene, the photograph was her only
physical connection with an absent father who was already living in France by the time
she was born. The film, however, quickly dispels any presumption of family photographs
287
providing a simple or direct access to the history from which Sandrine feels so removed.
Instead, the use of a collage style of animation that layers photographs and images from
personal and official archives along with drawings from children’s books and Stoïanov’s
own illustrations begins to suggest that:
Family life, even in its most intimate moments, is entrenched in a
collective imaginary shaped by public, generational structures of fantasy
and projection and by a shared archive of stories and images that inflect
the transmission of individual and familial remembrance.
50

Stoïanov creates, through a brightly colored animated canvas that resembles a child’s
pop-up book, a fantasy world that integrates her aunt’s memories and her own childhood
imaginings. This fantastical integration is conveyed by the superimposition of indexical
and non-indexical imagery to create an affective whole. As such, the film illustrates
Hirsch’s suggestion that “postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually
mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.”
51

Stoïanov’s ‘imaginative investment’ in the past takes the form of a fairytale of
Russian culture and family history. By way of animation Stoïanov inserts herself as a
character – Sandrinka - in her aunt’s memories. At one point, the young Sandrinka, a
black and white drawn figure, throws open the doors of her ancestral home and explores
the corridors, which are lined with photographs from Stoïanov’s family archive (see
figure 5.2). The little girl’s fascination with the ‘portraits’ of her forebears that hang
along the hallway mirrors Stoïanov’s own discovery of her past through her aunt. When
one gallant looking Cossack springs from a photograph and waltzes Sandrinka down the
hall the merging of animation and photography within a mythical, fairytale world
suggests a certain continuity with the past is being achieved through this work of
288
postmemory. The melding of Sandrine’s fantasies and Irene’s memories is demonstrated
at the end of the film when Sandrinka meets Irinka, Stoïanov’s animated projection of her
aunt as a child. The two young girls connect and through the encounter of these two
animated characters Stoïanov symbolizes a fusion of herself with her family history.

Figure 5.2: Irinka and Sandrinka (Sandrine Stoïanov, 2007)
In Sandrinka and Irinka the past is being reimagined from Stoïanov’s point of
view. This animated work of (auto)biography is a way for her to understand the
implications of her family history for her own identity. As Hirsch tells us, “postmemory
is not identical to memory: it is “post,” but at the same time, it approximates memory in
its affective force.”
52
Stoïanov’s interpretation of her aunt’s memories and her insertion
of herself as a character in past events is indicative of the affective power of these
memories on her sense of self.
289
Irinka and Sandrinka and Learned By Heart both function to connect their
creators to a broader, collective memory. Furthermore, it is through animation that the
filmmakers weave themselves into a national or ancestral past. Through telling stories,
not only about themselves, but also about their countries of origin and their families,
Rimminen and Stoïanov’s films are works of identity formation. By maintaining the
continuity of collective memory these films are avoiding the distancing of ‘general
History.’ Moreover, they suggest a specificity of collective memory that counters the
often broad sweep of history, a discourse that frequently neglects the role played by
women. As such Irinka and Sandrinka and Learned By Heart go some way to redress the
gender imbalance regarding memory noted by Kate Chedgzoy. She notes that despite the
traditional association of memory with femaleness imbued since the embodiment of
memory in the female form of the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, “women’s contributions
to cultural memory have scarcely been noted in the twentieth century’s explosion of work
in that subject.”
53
The films discussed here suggest the importance of gendered-specific
remembering in both an understanding of our cultural past and an understanding of
ourselves.
Marita Sturken has distinguished a concept of cultural memory from both
collective and individual memory as well as from history. For her, cultural memory is
“shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural
products and imbued with cultural meaning.”
54
Cultural memory is distinct from
collective memory because it is entailed by the production of the artifacts of culture, such
as film and television images. Furthermore, cultural memory “is bound up in complex
290
political stakes and meanings” as a “field of cultural negotiation through which different
stories vie for a place in history.”
55
Sturken’s theorization of cultural memory can help us
understand how the animated documentaries discussed in this section engage in a
“cultural negotiation” regarding both the relevance of women in post-War Finnish history
and the meaning of post-revolutionary Russian history for self-identity. By replaying and
redrawing history from a subjective perspective, Learned By Heart and Irinka and
Sandrinka interject into official, ‘general’ history. In so doing, they work to weave their
creators into a collective recollection of the past and counter the absence of continuity.
They do this, in part, through the formal excesses of animation, an aesthetic that goes
beyond the mere indexical capacity of photographic images to recall past events and
people. Rather than offering a simple “umbilical cord” with the past,
56
these films
entwine their makers into the complex fabric of a subjective, familially- and nationally-
specific recollection.

The Unspoken and the Forgotten: The Trauma in/of History in Silence and Waltz
With Bashir
This section discusses two films that engage with a traumatic past that has either been
forgotten or hushed into silence. Orly Yadin and Sylvia Bringas’s Silence (1998) is a
short animated film that revisits Tana Ross’s childhood in the Theresienstadt
concentration camp and then in Sweden. Ari Folman’s animated documentary feature
Waltz With Bashir (2008) is an exploration of the filmmaker’s repressed memories of
fighting in the 1982 Lebanon war. Harald Weinrich’s analysis of the etymology of the
291
Greek word for truth (alethia) reveals the origins of the conflation of truth and memory.
He tells us “on the basis of the construction of the word alethia one can also conceive
truth as the ‘unforgotten’ or the ‘not-to-be-forgotten.’”
57
Accessing the truth of past
events is conventionally aligned with remembering these events accurately. Indeed, this
conflation is indicated by the dependence on the accuracy of witness testimony in legal
trials as well as the credibility of certain types of documentary resting on the credibility
of interviewees’ accounts of the past. Weinrich points out, however, that we have more
recently “attempted to grant forgetting a certain truth as well.”
58
This observation marks
out an important idea for this discussion – that it is not only what we remember but what
we forget or remember incorrectly that can come to have great significance regarding the
true meaning of past events. Furthermore, I will suggest that animation can be seen as a
means for overcoming the effacement of a past blocked by traumatic experience.
Traumatic events are often experienced as an absence - an absence of memory or
an absence of feeling. Ernst van Alphen has suggested that trauma is “failed
experience.”
59
Following Teresa de Lauretis and Joan W. Scott, van Alphen theorizes
experience as discursive, rather than direct and unmediated. As such, trauma is an
experience “that has not come about and that shows negatively symptoms of the
discursivity that defines ‘successful’ experience.”
60
As such, a traumatic event is often
understood as an aporia in subjective experience and also for the possibilities of
representation. Michael Renov notes that “the Holocaust offers itself as an aporia for
aesthetic representation just as it does for historiography” and the unrepresentability of
292
the Holocaust in particular has been frequently commented on since Theodore Adorno
proclaimed in 1949 that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz.
61

The aporetic impact of the Holocaust has often resulted, as Joshua Hirsch has
observed, in artistic responses that reject conventional forms of narrative and
representation. Regarding cinema in particular, Hirsch notes that films about the
Holocaust often resist “classical realist forms of film narration traditionally used to
provide a sense of mastery over the past … adopting instead modernist forms of
narration.”
62
Hirsch goes on to claim:
All historical representation is … limited in at least three ways: by
signification (the ontological difference between the reality and the sign,
including the memory-sign), by documentation (limited documentation of
the past), and by discourse (limited framing of documents by the
conventions of discourse).
63

If modernist narration is a way of overcoming the limitations of historical representation
by means of narrative structure and mode of delivery, then I suggest that animation is a
means of overcoming these limitations by means of aesthetics. This echoes one of the
central theses of Janet Walker’s study of ‘trauma cinema,’ in which she argues that non-
realist aesthetic approaches are often the most appropriate style for films that engage with
traumatic events.
64

Just as a ‘modernist narrative’ or an alternative style of filmmaking to classical
Hollywood lends itself to fictional films about the Holocaust, animation lends itself to
documentaries about traumatic pasts. Orly Yadin reflects on the process of deciding
what approach to take to re-telling Tana Ross’s story of a childhood spent hiding from
293
guards in a concentration camp followed by an adolescence of hiding from her past in
Sweden.
A child’s experience of being in a concentration camp as remembered 50
years later – how to convey it? Through archival footage of children
found by the allies at the end of the War? Through symbolic effects of
dark and light? By filming an interview with a 60-year-old woman and
trying to imagine her as a little girl? Or… … by creating a child’s world
view through animated images.
65

Here, Yadin implies the shortcomings of a conventional documentary approach to Ross’s
biography. This is not least because Ross had no visual mementoes to speak of from her
childhood, just a few photographs and some letters. Furthermore, Yadin points out that
there was no known extant archival footage that could illustrate Ross’s experiences, only
a Nazi propaganda film made of Theresienstadt.
66
Instead, Yadin and her fellow
producer-director Sylvie Bringas chose to convey the story of Ross’s traumatic formative
years through the medium of animation. As a result, Silence’s aesthetic is as, if not more,
revealing than any orthodox or ostensibly objective documentary approach.
As a child in 1940s Berlin, Ross was separated from her mother and sent to
Theresienstadt. Here, by miraculous coincidence, she found her grandmother who kept
her hidden until the end of the War, safe from transportation to the death camps in the
East. Later, when living with family in Sweden, Ross’s voicelessness about the trauma
she experienced in the camps was induced by her aunt’s protestations that she remain
quiet about her past. “Don’t tell. Don’t tell,” her aunt urged her. “We don’t ever want to
know. Ever.” This enforced silence mirrored the trauma of her early childhood, when
her continued existence was predicated on her ability to remain silent and to disappear.
Ross’s life became a paradox of existence/ non-existence that was exacerbated by her
294
aunt’s frequent pleas for her to forget her past. Silence and denial became integral to
Ross’s identity. “I didn’t speak… I couldn’t,” she tells us.
Ross’s first attempt to revisit her past was in a word-and-music piece co-written
with composer Noa Ain.
67
This medium of this work, a kind of concerto-poem for cello
and spoken voice, already indicates the unrepresentability of Ross’s memories. The past
cannot, for Ross, be tackled head-on, a result of decades of doing just as she was taught
as a child, forgetting and denying. Rather than a straight narrative re-telling of her
experiences, Ross instead chose to express her past in a more interpretive and abstract
way. Bringas and Yadin worked with the original text of Ross’s poem to construct
Silence, stripping “it from sentiment and from words that could be better expressed
through images.”
68
The animated visuals are accompanied by a voice over spoken by
Ross, adapted from the original poem.
The animation is made in two distinct styles to reflect the two sections of the film,
first Theresienstadt and then Stockholm. The former, animated by Ruth Lingford, is dark
and foreboding in a black and white style that evokes the look of a woodcut. We segue
into this world from a short introductory section of stock footage of 1940s Germany
showing scenes of the persecution and ghettoization of the Jewish population. One of
Ross’s few photographs from her childhood, her mother holding her as a babe-in-arms, is
superimposed on this footage. As Ross tells us that “one day my mother left me” the
baby Tana twists out of her mother’s arms and morphs into a fragile white animated
figure, curled in the fetal position and spinning on a black background. Once we enter
the camp, we have left the potentiality of photographic images and their direct physical
295
link with reality, instead we are subsumed into the darkness of the expressive, woodcut-
style animation.

Figure 5.3: Silence (Sylvie Bringas and Orly Yadin, 1998)
The events that take place in Sweden are animated by Tim Webb in bright, strong
colors. Immediately, the contrast in the two animation styles begins to convey the
experience of Ross’s childhood. First there was darkness, a world filled with shadows.
The woodcut-style renders everything but the demarcated objects and characters as a
black void, a looming threatening emptiness (see figure 5.3). Only after liberation could
life be lived in color. Upon arrival in Sweden the world is thrown into relief and begins
296
to exist outside of fear and horror. This is implied by the changes in color palate and
visual scope as the animated frame becomes fuller and more complete.
The subjectivity of the animation to Ross’s personal history stands in contrast to
the few instances of archival material in the film. The black and white footage of 1940s
Berlin and the ravaged streets of post-War central Europe stand out in their generality.
They are used to provide a broader context for Ross’s story, but seem removed and
voyeuristic in comparison to the animation. As such, they function to emphasize the
specificity of the animation to this particular story. This contrast also demonstrates Bill
Nichols’ observation that traumatic events, most especially the Holocaust, cannot easily
be folded into “a larger historical frame.”
69
Animation is a way of resisting the
generalization of such a framework of understanding.
Furthermore, our understanding of Ross’s story comes not from the animated
characters’ resemblance to Ross or the other people in the story. Neither does it come
from accurately reconstructing scenes of the camps or post-War Sweden. The nature of
the medium, its subjective mode of creation and the interpretive and symbolic
implications in the hand-created images, lends itself to carrying meaning beyond its
iconicity. When the image of the train carrying Ross and her grandmother to Sweden
morphs from a bright colorful tableaux to the black and white oppressive style of the
earlier Theresienstadt section we understand, in that brief moment, the young Ross’s
dread of trains and all their implications of heading East to the death camps. The
Swedish guard helping Ross off the train metamorphoses into a German officer and
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Ross’s memory of the fear and trepidation of this journey is encapsulated in a few frames,
without any support from an explanatory voice-over.
The choice to use animation, rather than conventional photographic-based images,
to document Ross’s childhood indicates the inadequacy of the latter in conveying the
meaning and truth of decades of forgetting the past. Animation breaks Ross’s silence in a
way that also provides commentary on the act of silence itself. This is a past that must be
excavated and re-drawn, frame-by-frame, not a history that can be easily accessed
through a visual “umbilical cord.” The enforcement of Ross’s silence about her
experiences in the camp is indicated at several moments during the Swedish section of
the film. As her aunt tucks her up in bed and admonishes her to not tell of her past the
color image of the young Ross safely lying under the bedclothes morphs into the black
and white image of her being buried among linens in the clothes basket in which her
grandmother kept her hidden at Theresienstadt. This sequence makes a visual connection
between Ross’s verbal silence and earlier physical invisibility and helps us understand
her difficulty in speaking of her past. The lasting impact of her time in the camp is
illustrated in a later sequence. The animated figure of Ross spins on a blue background,
much as the fetal figure did earlier in the film against the black background. This time,
Ross’s figure grows to indicate the passing of years. “I was twenty-years-old” Ross tells
us on the soundtrack, “yet I was still invisible, still the best at hiding.” As she speaks
these words, the animated figure curls up into a suitcase, reminiscent of earlier scenes
where Ross is packed away and hidden from the German guards.
298
Cathy Caruth has suggested that “the traumatized … carry an impossible history
with them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history they cannot entirely
possess.”
70
One result of the impossibility of possessing a traumatic history is
demonstrated in Silence. It takes Tana Ross fifty years to speak of her past, to verbalize
her experiences and, as such, gain some sort of possession of them rather than them
possessing her. The film, however, begs a broader question of how we come to terms
with an unrepresentable past. Caruth refers to Shoshana Feldman’s concept of the “crisis
of truth” that is incited by trauma:
Such a crisis of truth extends beyond the question of individual cure and
asks how we in this era can have access to our own historical experience,
to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no
simple access
71

The force of traumatic events, Caruth and Feldman suggest, dislocates us from them,
making them hard to access and even harder to understand and assimilate into our sense
of personal identity.
Janet Walker coins the term “disremembering” to describe a certain tendency in
our recollection of trauma. “Disremembering … is remembering with a difference” and
is a process characterized by “conjuring mental images and sounds related to past events
but altered in certain respects.”
72
By this token, Walker stresses the importance of
seemingly false memories to our reconciliation with a past trauma. Particularly, she
claims “fantasy constructions in memory are … part and parcel of its character.”
73
This
tallies with Walker’s assertion that non-realist modes of representation are the most
appropriate to ‘trauma cinema.’ She applies this suggestion equally to fiction and
nonfiction film and suggests “trauma documentaries warp the continuum by combining
299
alternative strategies with those conventions that have established documentary as a
nonfiction mode. They signal the abjection of supposedly objective forms of filmmaking
in the process of disremembering history.”
74
If fantasy and disremembering play an
important part in the recollection of trauma it follows that a non-‘objective’ mode of
documentary presentation that embraces expressivity and symbolism, such as animation,
can help access a traumatic past.
Animation’s potential to reconnect us to a traumatic past through non-realist
representation is demonstrated in Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir. The film is a vehicle
for Folman to explore his suppressed memories of fighting in the Israeli Defense Forces
[IDF] during the 1982 Lebanon War. In particular, the film represents the journey he
takes to come to terms with his involvement in the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the
Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut. The guilt Folman carries at being part of the IDF
troops who lit illumination rounds to aid the Christian Phalangist militia’s raid on the
camp has blocked all his memories of the war. Hearing of a friend’s recurring nightmare
about the war triggers Folman’s own flashback of the night of the massacre. While
Folman’s friend Boaz is haunted on a nightly basis by his own memory of having to
shoot dogs during the war, Folman can remember nothing of his time as a soldier and
cannot determine whether this new flashback is a memory or a fantasy. In order to
determine its veracity, Folman goes on a quest to find other people who were with him in
Beirut that night.
75
The film, which is entirely animated bar one short section at the end,
comprises a series of interviews, interspersed with visualizations of the experiences and
memories described by the interviewees.
300
The animation style and its ability to seem simultaneously realist and fantastical
helps communicate the film’s overall attitude to the reality and significance of memory
and dreams. While it does not attempt photorealism in the manner of Walking With
Dinosaur’s digital reconstructions, the animation in Waltz With Bashir seems to bear a
close relationship to reality, so much so that the style is sometimes mistakenly attributed
to Rotoscope techniques.
76
There was a concern for visual authenticity in the design of
the animation – the characters were constructed using as reference the video footage of
the original interviews and Art Director David Polonsky used both still and moving
archival images of Lebanon in the 1980s as a basis for his design of the backgrounds and
layouts.
77
Similarly, the film is devoid of the visual symbolism found in examples
discussed in previous chapters, such as Animated Minds. Characters and locations look
realistic and we could recognize the ‘real’ person or place from their animated
counterpart. The animation design, however, is still highly stylized, an effect gained in
part through light-and-shadow techniques and the color palate.
This stylized look is most pronounced in the flashback to the night of the
massacre that so perplexes Folman at the beginning of the film. Folman and two other
young soldiers float on their backs in the Mediterranean Sea, staring up at an amber-
colored night sky that is reflected on their naked bodies and turns the whole scene a tone
of sepia. After Folman and his companions rise out of the sea, they dress and walk with
dreamlike slowness into the city and into a crowd of women wearing hijab. The young
Folman stands frozen as the throng of women passes by him.
301
Other dreams, memories and hallucinations recounted by the interviewees also
adopt a similar atmosphere of subtle surrealism, an effect achieved as much from the
music and the pacing of these scenes as from any intrinsic aspect of the animation itself.
Roni recalls swimming for miles down the coast after being separated from his tank
battalion in an ambush. He breaststrokes in a dark sea under an inky night sky. The
calmness of the ocean along with the vast expanse of it that stretches to the edges of the
frame illustrates the conflicting feelings of calm and fear Roni experienced while
swimming for his life that evening. Carmi remembers the hallucination he had while
passed out on the boat that was transporting him to war. In a misty, hazy, blue seascape
Carmi is cradled by the body of a giant female figure that, accompanied by ethereal string
music, languidly backstrokes through the water. He watches impassively as the boat
carrying his friends blows up in a dramatic fireball that turns the sky and ocean a vivid,
burning shade of orange.
At several times during the film Folman consults his friend, Ori, who is also a
psychiatrist. Ori points out that in our dreams the sea functions as a manifestation of fear
and feelings. For Folman his fear and dread about his involvement in the massacre are
projected onto a flashback involving the sea. Carmi’s anxieties on his boat trip that took
him to active service and Roni’s fears for his life while escaping an ambush are similarly
transferred onto memories involving the sea. The sea becomes a vessel that carries fears
and feelings that are hard to come to terms with and painful to remember.
While the animation design in the more hallucinatory dream and flashback
sequences takes on an air of stylization, it is not markedly different, in terms of its
302
integral style, to the animation in the rest of the film (see figures 5.4 and 5.5). Dream
sequences, flashbacks and hallucinations are all presented in a similar style to the
interview sequences. Elements of lighting and coloration may be slightly more surreal in
the former, but the shape and likeness of characters and objects are equally as realistic (or
non-realistic) throughout the film. The differences are subtle and more ones of feel and
atmosphere than look or style. This was a conscious choice by the filmmakers who did
not want to prioritize the truth of one component of the film over another.
78
Through the
film’s aesthetic consistency, dreams and memories are given equal epistemological
weighting to the present day interviews. Hallucinations and perhaps incorrect
recollections of the past are implied as significant as the delivery of verbal recollection.
Both are evidence that can be used to unearth Folman’s buried memories.

Figure 5.4: Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), flashback sequence
303

Figure 5.5: Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), present-day sequence
Folman’s disremembered incident of floating in the sea on the night of the Sabra
and Shatila massacre becomes significant for several reasons in the film.
Atmospherically it is marked out as fantastical because of the surreal color and lighting in
this sequence. Conversely, its stylistic similarity to the rest of the film articulates the
point mentioned above regarding the parity of different types of recollection of the past.
Furthermore, the repetition of the flashback (we see it three times) is an indication that
Folman suffers from post-traumatic stress induced by the war. Cathy Caruth tells us:
While the precise definition of post-traumatic stress disorder is contested,
most descriptions generally agree that there is a response, sometimes
delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of
repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours
stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during
of after the experience.
79

304

Traumatic events resist assimilation into a seamless narrative of autobiography. This
resistance to narrative indicates the aporetic quality of traumatic events. They are
experienced as an absence and this indicates, according to Dominick LaCapra, that they
have not been “viably worked through.”
80
It is this “compulsive repetition of the aporetic
relation” that induces the repeated visions of the flashback. As Caruth points out, “the
literal registration of an event – the capacity to continually, in the flashback, reproduce it
in exact detail – appears to be connected, in traumatic experience, precisely with the way
it escapes full consciousness as it occurs.”
81
The recurrence of the flashback shows us
that at the beginning of the film, when Folman has his first flashback, he experiences the
war only as an absence - an absence of complete memory of the events and his role and
an absence of understanding of the meaning and truth of this flashback. As such, “the
flashback … conveys … both the truth of an event, and the truth of its
incomprehensibility.”
82

Not only is Folman’s post-trauma experienced through the repetition of the
flashbacks, but also in his dislocation from the memory. Visually, the flashback is
presented almost entirely from a third-person point of view, but there are also two
moments when we see things through Folman’s eyes. We look down on Folman’s face
as he lies in the Mediterranean, staring up at the amber night sky. This perspective
changes to Folman’s point of view and we see the bombed-out high rises on the shore in
the background and Folman’s toes poking out of the water in the foreground before he
uprights himself to walk out of the sea. Later as he walks into the city we see him in
medium close-up, the ‘camera’ tracking backwards at the same pace as Folman and his
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three companions walk through the streets. As he turns the corner into the crowd of
women, we switch to a view from behind his head, maintaining the same medium close-
up. The ‘camera’ then pans around Folman and in tight on his face before cutting to the
next scene. This sequence works to simultaneously envelop and distance us from the
memory. There are moments that encourage us to imagine we are experiencing events as
Folman did that night – the toes popping out of the sea, the sea of women washing past
us. Other moments, however, contradict this suggestion and for the majority of the
sequence the positioning of Folman within the frame seems to imply a kind of out-of-
body experience. The tension within this sequence in terms of our placement within the
scene mirrors the “fundamental dislocation implied by all traumatic experience”
83
and
suggests Folman’s own epistemological and emotional distance from these events. Just
as we do not know if we are occupying the position of Folman or a third party in this
sequence, Folman himself does not know whether he was actually present at the events
he is beginning to remember.
Here we can return to the words from Caruth cited earlier and her claim that “the
traumatized … carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the
symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”
84
Just as Tana Ross’s years of
silence prevented her possession of her past in the concentration camps, so too Folman is
a symptom of history. At one point during Waltz With Bashir, Folman’s psychiatrist
friend Ori suggests that his memories of the past are not only being impeded by his fears
regarding the role he might have played in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, but that they
are also blocked by the ever present postmemory of the Holocaust. We learn that
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Folman’s parents were in Auschwitz and Ori tells him “the massacre has been with you
since you were six” in the form of the ‘other’ massacre at the ‘other’ camps. Folman’s
discovery that he was part of a unit that fired the flares that lit the Phalangist’s attack on
the refugee camps explains his amnesia regarding the night of the massacre. Folman
feels guilt, Ori explains, at unwittingly taking on the role of the Nazi, regardless of
whether he fired a gun, fired a flare or just watched. He did not stop the massacre, and in
Folman’s subconscious mind that negative action is as abhorrent as the Nazi guard who
claims to just be following orders.
Just as Silence signifies Ross gaining ownership of her past, so too Waltz With
Bashir is a journey of Folman coming to terms with and claiming possession of his past.
In particular, the repetitious flashback functions as a working-through of the director’s
traumatic experience and fears regarding his culpability in the massacre of thousands of
innocent Palestinians. Towards the end of the film, Folman regains his memory of the
night of the massacre and remembers being on a rooftop close to the refugee camps. In
this sequence the color palate of the flashback sequence suddenly makes sense as we see
the exploding flares light the sky a rich shade of amber. At this moment, the style of the
flashback sequence, which previously seemed surreal, is put in perspective. In fact, we
realize, Folman was remembering accurately the way the city looked that night under the
flares’ light. We recognize at that moment that the seemingly fantastical yellow skies of
the dream, flashback and hallucination sequences have in fact been deeply connecting
Folman’s disremembering to the truth of the past.
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Folman’s integration into the past is, however, far from seamless and Waltz With
Bashir continues up to its final moments to complicate the relationship between memory,
the past and truth. The film’s final animated sequence ends with the ‘camera’ dollying
through a crowd of Palestinian women walking out of the refugee camp. Their hands are
thrown to their heads as they vocally express their grief. The ‘camera’ continues through
the women and pushes into two soldiers in the distance and, as we get closer, we realize
one of the soldiers is the young Folman. This sequence works to make sense of the final
section of the flashback in which Folman is silently enveloped by the sea of Muslim
women. One could further argue that this suggestion that the flashback now makes sense
and Folman has remembered his involvement in the war is upheld by what happens next.
After we hold on the medium close-up of the young Folman, his breath visibly heaving in
his chest as if he is trying to calm rising panic, the image cuts to live action footage of
mourning women emerging from the camps. The next, and last, few minutes of the film
continue with this live action material. Women cry with grief and rail at the television
news camera and then we silently pan across scene after scene of dead bodies lying in the
dusty rubble.
The conclusion of the film with the live action archive footage suggests narrative
resolution. Folman has remembered his past and the journey of the film to find out what
role he played in the massacres and to identify his flashback as true or false reaches its
end. The question remains, however, as to whether the inclusion of live action material
negates, aesthetically, what came before. If the film was attempting to suggest, as David
Polonsky claims, an epistemological parity between the present-day interviews and the
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recollections of the past through adopting a consistent animation style throughout, what
does the addition of live action documentary footage at the moment of narrative
resolution say? We could read it as proclaiming the epistemological superiority of live
action material over animation. It is after all the former that is chosen to indicate that
Folman has accessed his past and it is this also that is chosen for the film’s sober
conclusion, suggesting it has more potential impact than the stylized animation.
The inclusion of the live action footage is more, however, than a simple
resolution. This footage only makes sense in the context of the ninety minutes of
animation that precedes it. Traumatic recollection, Caruth reminds us, is not a simple
memory.
85
The television news images may reveal the truth of the event, but the truth of
the experience is, for Folman, as much about its incomprehensibility as about what
actually happened. If forgetting has a truth, as Weinrich tells us, then in this case
Folman’s forgetting marks the severity of his traumatic memory and postmemory. It is
through the animated journey that we learn of the true meaning of the war for Folman.
Memory, the film suggests, is as ephemeral as the past itself. Memory, as Ori tells
Folman, “is dynamic, it’s alive.”

Conclusion
The films discussed in this chapter demonstrate the potential of animation as a tool to
access the past and a medium of recollection. The association of memory and
photography is, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, founded on the
indexicality of the photographic image and its ability, through the causal relationship of
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image and reality, to somehow retain a physical trace of the past. This concomitance of
photography and history has, I would suggest, exacerbated the notion of the past as
fragmented and something from which we are disconnected. The weight of this
association is indicated by the frequency with which Benjamin’s formulation of history is
quoted in studies of history, memory, visual media and the past. “The past can be seized
only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen
again.”
86
Benjamin’s words suggest the past as ungraspable and something that is
endlessly ruptured by the temporality of existence.
It has also been suggested above, however, that memory forms an integral part of
personal identity by creating continuity with the past. Animation in the four films
discussed in this chapter is a way of linking with a past from which one is dislocated.
Unlike photographic media, which seems to highlight the distance of the past as an
instant that cannot be recaptured, animation is a way for the autobiographer to weave
him- or herself into history. Moreover, the specificity and subjectivity of the animated
form makes it particularly appropriate for the telling of personal stories that do not fit into
the often more general histories that favor hegemonic power relations. Through
animation these histories can be contested and filmmakers can instead connect
themselves to a collective history that is identity-specific.
It may seem counter-intuitive that a non-indexical media form may be the most
apposite way of remembering the past. This is, however, another indication of the
dialectic potential of the convergence of animation and non-fiction. The absence of
indexical evidence of the past combines with the rich tapestry of animation’s visual
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excesses, which go beyond merely re-presenting the past, to convey the meaning of both
personal history and the act of remembering it. The absence of indexical images speaks
to the absences in knowledge and memory several of these filmmakers have about their
pasts. The process of making their films becomes a way of reconnecting to this history.
Stoïanov learns of her ancestral stories, Ross is given voice to talk of her experience in
Theresienstadt, and Folman realizes the significance of his forgetting the Lebanon War.
Furthermore, the aesthetic properties of each film’s animation style speak to the
specificity of the autobiographers’ pasts. This specificity comes not through
photographic media that can be linked to a certain time and place, but through the
expressivity of animation that can be interpreted as speaking directly to the experience of
those whose stories are being told. It is precisely because these images are not indexical,
but combine the iconic and the symbolic, that we come to know and understand both the
past and how it is (or is not) remembered. Once again, the evocative potential of
animation allows us insight to subjective reality.

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Chapter V Endnotes

1
These sections were animated by Emily Hubley, daughter of John and Faith Hubley, whose
work is discussed in chapter one.

2
Sturken, Tangled Memories, 11.

3
Leslie, “Absent-Minded Professors: Etch-a-Sketching Academic Forgetting,” 181.

4
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77.

5
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390.

6
Barthes, 15.

7
Cadava, Words of Light, 10.

8
Ibid., 13.

9
Walker, Trauma Cinema, 165.

10
Walker, 166.

11
Benjamin, 391.

12
Postmemory, discussed below, is a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe memories not
experienced directly, but ‘inherited’ from an older generation. See Hirsh, Famiy Frames:
Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.

13
Renov, The Subject of Documentary, xi.

14
Ibid., xvi.

15
Radstone and Hodgkin, “Introduction,” Memory Cultures, 2.

16
Ibid., 6.

17
Renov, xii.

18
Ibid., 177-78.

19
Lant, “Women’s Independent Cinema.”

20
Wells, Understanding Animation, 198.

21
Radstone and Hodgkin, 10.

312

22
Rossington and Whitehead, “Introduction,” Theories of Memory, 10.

23
Sturken, Tangled Memories, 4.

24
Radstone and Hodgkin, 10.

25
Whitehead, Memory, 13.

26
King, Memory, Narrative, Identity, 2.

27
Sturken, 1.

28
Chedgzoy, “Introduction,” 217.

29
Halbwachs’s two works on memory are Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 1925; and La
Mémoire collective, published posthumously in 1950.

30
Waterson, “Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Memory,” 52.

31
Whitehead, 126.

32
Sturken, 4.

33
Whitehead, 126.

34
Halbwachs, “From The Collective Memory,” 139.

35
Ibid.

36
Ibid.

37
http://www.marjutrimminen.com/2007/learned-by-heart#more-5 (accessed May 16, 2009).

38
http://www.marjutrimminen.com/2007/learned-by-heart#more-5 (accessed May 16, 2009).

39
A super-title at the beginning of this chapter informs us that ‘Lord’ in Finnish translates as ‘Sir’
and ‘man.’

40
Cut-out animation creates the illusion of movement through the frame-by-frame manipulation
of objects, or limbs, that are cut out, traditionally of card or stiff fabric, and moved incrementally
between shots.

41
Bal, “Introduction,” Acts of Memory, xi.

42
Tuan, The Poetics of Space, 195.

313

43
Spitzer, “Back Through the Future: Nostalgic Memory and Critical Memory in a Refuge from
Nazism,” 92.

44
Rossington and Whitehead, “Introduction,” Theories of Memory, 7.

45
Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 111.

46
Ibid.

47
Ibid., 106.

48
Ibid.

49
Ibid., 107.

50
Ibid., 114.

51
Ibid., 107.

52
Ibid., 109.

53
Czedgzoy, 216.

54
Sutrken, 3.

55
Ibid., 1.

56
Barthes, 81.

57
Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, 4.

58
Ibid.

59
van Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity,” 25.

60
Ibid., 26.

61
Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 161; Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 34.

62
Hirsch, Afterimage, 3.

63
Ibid., 5.

64
Walker, Trauma Cinema.

65
Yadin, “But is it Documentary?” 169.

314

66
Ibid., 168.

67
Commissioned by the municipality of Stockholm in 1995.

68
Yadin, 171.

69
Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 127.

70
Caruth, “Introduction to Part I,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 5.

71
Ibid., 6.

72
Walker, 17.

73
Ibid., 14.

74
Ibid., 25.

75
Some of the interviewees are friends of Folman’s, or people he served alongside during the
war. Other participants were found via an online appeal for people to tell stories of their
experiences fighting during the Lebanon War. Interviews with Ron Ben Yisahi, a television
journalist who played an prominent role in reporting the war, and Professor Zahava Solomon, a
Post Trauma Stress expert, are also included in the film.

76
See, for example, Anderson, “Brilliant ‘Bashir’ Brings a Dark Memory to Light.” This
attribution is perhaps understandable for Waltz With Bashir’s passing stylistic similarities to Bob
Sabiston’s film achieved via the Rotoshop programme (see chapter 3). David Polonsky, Art
Director of Waltz With Bashir, is keen to point out, however, that the animation in this film was
painstakingly produced through a computer-based cut-out technique. Polonsky, “How Real Can
it Get?”

77
Polonsky, “How Real Can it Get?”

78
Ibid.

79
Caruth, “Introduction to Part I,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 4.

80
LaCapra, “From History in Transit,” 206.

81
Caruth, “Introduction to Part II,’ Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 152-53.

82
Ibid., 153.

83
Caruth, ‘Introduction to Part I,’ Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 9.

315

84
Ibid., 5.

85
Caruth, ‘Introduction to Part II,’ Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 151.

86
Benjamin, 390.
316
CONCLUSION: IMAG(IN)ING THE IMPOSSIBLE

“How are you going to supply a photograph of Jesus? Not an etching, engraving, or a
painting … an actual photograph of Jesus.” So we hear a baffled archivist contemplate,
along with the many other bizarre requests received by the Hulton image archive in
London, in Laurie Hill’s 2008 award-winning short documentary Photograph of Jesus.
The increasingly incredulous ruminations of the archivist (“how is that possible?!?” to the
request for a picture of an Edwardian lady in the Victorian era, “what does that even
mean?”) are accompanied by visual imagery that makes the seemingly impossible come
to life. Hilary Clinton is clutched in a passionate embrace with a Second World War
soldier; Hitler springs over the hurdles at the 1948 Olympic games in London (see figure
6.1). The preposterous requests for photographs that cannot possibly exist are animated
using digital manipulation techniques that combine and bring to life existing photos from
the archive. Thus, an “Edwardian lady” peels off her photographic surroundings and
shuffles along the shelf to a box labelled “Victorian Period, 1837-1901” and the
impossible request is granted.
What Hill’s droll film illustrates, apart from the lack of common sense of many
people who make requests of archives, is our desire to transcend the limitations of
photographic media. The archivist recounts the often frustrated responses he gets to his
denial of the most outlandish requests, “why haven’t you got it? Why doesn’t it exist?”
While Hill’s film demonstrates the absurdity of granting these photographic wishes, it
also shows animation’s potential to respond to the shortcomings of photographic media.
In our expanded world of visual representations of reality, where prehistoric creatures are
317
brought back to life and fantasy worlds are rendered in startlingly realistic style, our
expectations of what we should be able to see have been raised.

Figure 6.1: Photograph of Jesus (Laurie Hill, 2008)
The convergence of animation and documentary is an expansive evolution of both
forms. It is a movement that responds to the contemporary media climate and speaks to
the future of visual representation. It is a development that transcends constricted
definitions and understandings of what, and how, documentary and animation can show
us. It is a demonstration of our increasingly sophisticated ability to interpret complex
images and our increasing demands for images that challenge and excite our conception
of representation. These demands on visual representation have been a long time coming
and are fuelled, in part, by our increasing awareness of the malleable nature of the image
and the potential for deception.
318
By the mid-1990s there was a growing anxiety, as observed by Brian Winston,
regarding the ease with which photographs could be digitally, and invisibly, altered.
1

This concern applies equally to moving images, and Winston ponders the potential effect
of digital editing software on the documentary film. “What can or will be left of the
relationship between image and reality?” Winston asks.
2
Fears over the veracity of
documentary imagery occurred concurrently with developments in reality television.
This form of “factual entertainment” and its capacity to depict deeply manipulated
situations in the style of fly-on-the-wall camerawork and secret filming places further
stress on the position of documentary. Not only could the final image be changed
without our knowledge, but the pro-filmic could be as much of a construction as any
fictional scenario.
At this time of documentary uncertainty, animation could be seen as an apposite
tool for nonfiction. There can be no mistaking the wholly fabricated nature of the
animated image.
3
By wearing its ontology on its sleeve, animation circumvents any
potential for duping or trickery. As such, the animated documentary takes the viewer
beyond a point of distrusting the origin of the image or the profilmic by embracing its
quality as a constructed form. By turning the weakness of potential manipulation into a
strength, the animated documentary avoids the doubts raised in the 1990s and takes the
documentary onto firmer epistemological grounds.
We have, furthermore, become increasingly attuned to the potentiality of digital
imagery to represent what we cannot see with our own eyes. Digital animation is no
longer the preserve of big-budget Hollywood science fiction or specialized industrial and
319
scientific practice. Washing detergent commercials use digital animation to represent dirt
molecules being zapped away by a product’s cleaning power. Computer animation is
routinely used in television crime shows such as C.S.I. (CBS, 2000-ongoing) to represent
the effect of weapons on the human body and the forensic reconstruction of crime scenes.
Animation’s ability to transcend the everyday ocular experience is now beamed directly
into our homes, a commonplace occurrence in regular television viewing. Similarly, as
animated feature films offer up increasingly vibrant worlds through recent developments
in 3D technology, we have come to expect to see a picture of the world that enhances our
ability to see, imagine, and understand. Just as, for Vertov, the camera was “more perfect
than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills
space,”
4
so too digital animation has the capacity to expand our audio-visual experience
of the world and to offer us an intensified version of life as we live it.
For animation, this development is part of the form’s evolution from its early
inception as lighthearted, youth-oriented entertainment. Bouldin has observed that
“animation is often associated with children.”
5
This is a sentiment echoed by Michael
O’Pray, who attributes the “low status” of the form and its theoretical and critical neglect
as being due to “its massive use in children’s entertainment and in advertising.”
6
Erik
Patrick has noted, furthermore, animation’s traditional role is one of comic
entertainment.
7
The animated documentary is another way that animation is developing
beyond the ‘traditional’ associations of children’s entertainment. Rather than using the
unique characteristics of the form, such as metamorphosis and plasmaticness, to amuse or
distract, the animated documentary capitalizes on these capabilities to a different end.
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Animation can take on serious topics and can enhance our knowledge of the world, be
that the world of prehistoric creatures or the realities of living with mental illness.
As well as expanding our experience of animation and documentary viewing, the
animated documentary challenges the ways the two forms have been theorized. It has
been nearly twenty years since Bill Nichols described documentary as a “discourse of
sobriety.”
8
Representing Reality, the book in which Nichols claimed a kinship between
documentary and other sober forms such as education, science and economics, was a
significant step towards the legitimization of documentary studies. In making this claim
and establishing documentary as a form worth studying in its own right, Nichols was also
marking out documentary from its “other.” “Fiction harbors echoes of dreams and
daydreams, sharing structures of fantasy with them, whereas documentary mimics the
canons of expository argument, the making of a case, and the call to public rather than
private response.”
9
With these words Nichols defined documentary by distinguishing it
from fiction, seemingly denying the former the expressive potential of the latter to
connect with audiences on a personal, subjective level.
This distinction has filtered into a general understanding of documentary film.
Introductory texts on film studies often contrast documentary (if they mention it at all) to
fiction. The entry on documentary in the Oxford Guide to Film Studies, for example,
makes this summation:
Looking back on the achievements of a century of moving images, critics
often remark on two contrary tendencies. On the one hand, there is the
tradition of narrative, or fictional, film in which the primary object is to
divert or entertain, and, on the other hand, there is that of documentary
whose main aim, it has been said, is to instruct or inform.
10

321
The assumption that documentary should be unbiased and should teach us the plain facts
has prevailed. So to, it would seem, the black-and-white distinction between fiction and
documentary.
It may very well be true that we (be that enthusiasts, makers or scholars of
documentary) do not, and maybe never did, see documentary and fiction as binary
opposites. It still seems, however, we feel it necessary to repeat our reassertion of this
opposition’s non-existence. Nichols’s claims to documentary’s sobriety and its
dissimilitude to fiction were countered nearly as soon as they were made. Michael Renov
argued, two years after the publication of Representing Reality, “a view of documentary
which assumes too great a sobriety for nonfiction discourse will fail to comprehend the
sources of nonfiction’s deep-seated appeal.”
11
Nearly a decade and a half later, however,
Alisa Lebow still found it necessary to point out the “specious fact/fiction divide … that
dominates so many debates” within documentary studies.
12
This is in spite of Nichols
challenging his own earlier assertions regarding the ontology of documentary with his
acknowledgment, in 1994, of the blurred boundary between fact and fiction.
13
The
persistent re-assertion of the lack of a definitive distinction between fact and fiction is an
indication that the presumption of such a distinction still remains, enough, at least, to
demand continued disavowal.
Animation, similarly, has been theorized in negative terms. Joanna Bouldin
points out that scholars, fans, and filmmakers alike have tended to position animation as
the polar opposite to live action and reality.
14
Maureen Furniss, while attempting to avoid
making an absolute distinction between live action and animation, has reinforced this
322
idea through her theorization of the ontology of animation. Furniss acknowledges “there
is an immense area in which the two tendencies [animation and live action] overlap.”
15

She goes on, however, to construct a ‘continuum’ from mimesis to abstraction, terms she
adopts as “more neutral” than live action and animation. Her terminology fails to mask
the fact that her continuum is founded on a differentiation between these two forms and
the types of scenarios or ideas they are best suited to conveying. Furthermore, she
implies a further distinction by placing a real-time documentary (Andy Warhol’s Sleep
(1963)) at the mimesis end of the spectrum and an abstract animated film (Circles (Oskar
Fischinger, 1933)) at the abstraction end. Even though Furniss intends her continuum to
embrace the common ground shared by live action and animation, which she classes as
“both tendencies within motion picture production,”
16
there are still implications of
pitting certain films at different ends of the spectrum. Abstract animation and
observational documentary are at the two extremes of the scale and this suggests a
divergence between the two on all levels, be that of aesthetics, technique or
epistemology.
This study has not been concerned with once again exclaiming at the similarities
between documentary and fiction. Neither has it been an attempt to smooth over fissures
between animation and live action. This dissertation has, however, sought to escape the
binarism that seems to pervade attitudes towards both animation and documentary (and
often, the animated documentary) towards a more expansive understanding. Alan
Cholodenko has implored the rejection of binaries with respect to animation and
animation studies.
17
His “animatic” understanding of animation and film aims to enliven
323
the study of both, enriching our understanding through an acceptance of these forms, and
their theorization, as mutually constitutive on every level.
This basic sentiment of the animatic is one that has influenced this study.
Documentary and animation are not polar opposites, I have suggested. Furthermore, any
binaristic pigeonholing of the two is limiting our understanding of what an animated
documentary is and what it does. Rather, I have argued, animation has the potential to
animate both the documentary form and our theorization of it. Animation throws into
new relief some of the central questions of documentary studies - that of the nature of the
documentary image and what that image can tell us about the world. My study of
animated documentaries has demonstrated that animation can convey conventional
knowledge in a new way through digital animation techniques that copy the look of live
action material. Furthermore, animation has the potential to expand the realm of
documentary epistemology from the “world out there” of observable events to the “world
in here” of subjective experience. Through embracing the iconic and symbolic potential
of animation, documentary can shed the burden of indexicality. The animated
documentary is no less able to make truth claims about the world, but it may well be
making these claims in a different way or from a different perspective.
The practical and theoretical expansiveness of the animated documentary,
however, extends beyond the worlds of animation and documentary. The animated
documentary begs questions that are relevant to the broader discipline of film studies, and
beyond. Most especially, issues regarding our understanding and reception of moving
images. The notion of indexicality continues to enliven film studies and it has been key
324
to this study, particularly with my suggestion in chapter two of the epistemological
blurring of icon and index. Bringing animation into the discussion on indexicality
suggests new questions. Does animation itself have an index, and if so, what is this? A
material, causal link between profilmic and filmic in animation must reside in the
materiality of the image, rather than with some observable reality that once took place in
front of the camera. In Aardman’s animated films, the sign of a finger or thumb
imprinted on the clay of a puppet is a marker of the hand that created it. In hand-drawn
or painted animation the grain of the paint or the stroke of a pencil bears the trace of its
original inscription on the paper or cel that was later filmed. In Bob Sabiston’s
rotoshopped films the presence of the original profilmic event haunts the digital
animation, seeping through the realistic yet stylized images that resemble their human
counterparts. The animated moving image may be ephemeral, but it also carries an
indexical weight of its own and brings with it the presence of the filmmaker. Underlying
these questions is the demand for further examination of the way both documentary
studies and, more broadly, film studies understand the indexical, a concept that has been
key to theorizations of the non-fictional and our response to film more generally.
The animated documentary asks us to go beyond. Beyond our understanding and
expectation of these two styles of representation as discrete forms and to allow this
expanded reception and theorization to impact film and media studies more broadly. This
expansion is encouraged by the profusion of animated documentaries in the last two
decades, something that is itself a symptom of developments in the technology of
production. The cheapness and ready availability of tools, from digital cameras to
325
animation software, has made the production of animated documentaries more accessible,
a factor that has doubtless played a role in its increased visibility. As technology
continues to expand the possibilities for audio-visual media and as our demand for
increasingly sophisticated representations of the lived world increases we can only guess
at the future of the animated documentary. Developments in digital animation software
promise increasingly realistic digital representations of the world. Similarly, the success
and critical acclaim of films such as Waltz With Bashir (Folman, 2008) has laid the
groundwork for future mainstream-release feature-length animated documentaries that
explore subjective realities. Far from polar opposites, it seems that animation and
documentary have a long future together.
326
Conclusion Endnotes

1
Winston, Claiming the Real, 5.

2
Ibid., 6.

3
This is true even in the films and television series discussed in chapter two, which use digital
animation to mimic the look of live action. Digital animation techniques have certainly evolved
in the past twenty years, but it is debatable whether we are yet at the point where the difference
between digital animation and live action imagery is impossible to discern with the naked eye.

4
Vertov, Kino-Eye, 15.

5
Bouldin, “Cadaver of the Real,” 7.

6
O’Pray, “The Animated Film,” 434.

7
Patrick, “Representing Reality,” 46.

8
Nichols, Representing Reality, 3.

9
Ibid., 4.

10
Izod and Kilborn, “The Documentary,” 426.

11
Renov, “Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction,” 3.

12
Lebow, “Faking What? Making a Mockery of Documentary,” 225.

13
Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries.

14
Bouldin, “The Animated and the Actual,” 184.

15
Furniss, Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, 5.

16
Ibid., 6.

17
Cholodenko, “Introduction,” The Illusion of Life II.
327

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340

APPENDIX: FILMS DISCUSSED
(In chronological order)

As Animated Documentaries
Windy Day (John and Faith Hubley, US, 1967)
Cockaboody (John and Faith Hubley, US, 1973)
Animated Conversations (Aardman, UK, 1978)
Conversation Pieces (Aardman, UK, 1983)
Lip Synch (Aardman, UK, 1989) – inc. Creature Comforts
A is for Autism (Tim Webb, UK, 1992)
Feeling My Way (Jonathan Hodgson, UK, 1997)
His Mother’s Voice (Dennis Tupicoff, Australia, 1997)
My Universe Inside Out (Faith Hubley, US, 1997)
Project Incognito (Bob Sabiston, US, 1997)
Survivors (Sheila Sofian, US, 1997)
Roadhead (Bob Sabiston, US, 1998)
Silence (Bringas and Yadin, UK, 1998)
Drawn From Memory (Paul Fierlinger, US, 1999)
Snack and Drink (Bob Sabiston, US, 1999)
Walking With Dinosaurs (BBC, UK, 1999)
A Conversation With Haris (Sheila Sofian, US, 2001)
Hidden (David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn, Sweden, 2002)
Animated Minds (Andy Glynne, UK, 2003)
Backseat Bingo (Liz Blazer, US, 2003)
It’s Like That (Southern Ladies Animation Group, Australia, 2003)
Grasshopper (Bob Sabiston, US, 2004)
Ryan (Chris Landreth, Canada, 2004)
Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, US, 2007)
Irinka and Sandrinka (Sandrine Stoïanov, Belgium, 2007)
Learned By Heart (Marjut Rimminen and Päivi Takala, Finland, 2007)
Running in Darkness (Alan Jennings, US, 2007)
Battle 360 (The History Channel, US, 2008)
Life After People (The History Channel/ C4, US/UK, 2008)
Photograph of Jesus (Laurie Hill, UK, 2008)
Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel, 2008)

As Documentaries with Animated Sections
Early Edison instructional shorts (1910)
Bray educational films for US government (prior to 1916)
The Mechanics of the Human Brain (Pudovkin, USSR, 1926)
The Expansion of Germany (Andrew Miller Jones, UK, 1936)
341
Hell Ultd (Norman McLaren & Helen Biggar, UK, 1936)
Mediaeval England (Bundy & Goodliffe, UK, 1936)
An Outline of the Working Money (Michael Polanyi, UK, 1938)
Why We Fight (Frank Capra, US, 1942-45)
Victory Through Air Power (Disney, US, 1943)
Universe (NFBC, Canada, 1960)
Everything’s For You (Abraham Ravett, US, 1989)
Blue Vinyl (Judith Hefland and Daniel B. Gold, US, 2002)
Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, US, 2002)
An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, US, 2006)
She’s a Boy I Knew (Gwen Haworth, US, 2007)

As Animations on Non-fiction Topics
How Spiders Fly (Percy Smith, UK, 1909)
The Sinking of the Lusitania (Winsor McCay, US, 1918)
Fight for the Dardanelles (Percy Smith, UK, 1915)
How to Fire a Lewis Gun (Max Fleischer, US, 1917)
How to Read an Army Map (Max Fleischer, US, 1917)
Tommy Tucker’s Tooth (Walt Disney, US, 1922)
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Fleischers, US, 1923)
Evolution (Flesichers, US, 1923)
Clara Cleans Her Teeth (Walt Disney, US, 1926)
A Colour Box (Len Lye, UK, 1935)
Rainbow Dance (Len Lye, UK, 1936)
Trade Tattoo (Len Lye, UK, 1937)
Love on the Wing (Norman McLaren, UK, 1938)
Mony a Pickle (Norman McLaren, UK, 1938)
Four Methods of Flush Riveting (Disney, US, 1940)
Mail Early for Christmas (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1941)
Seven Wise Dwarfs (Disney, Canada, 1941)
Thrifty Pig (Disney, Canada, 1941)
5 for 4 (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1942)
Hen Hop (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1942)
The New Spirit (Disney, US, 1942)
Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Firing Line (Disney, US, 1942)
Stop That Tank (Disney, Canada, 1942)
The Spirit of ’43 (Disney, US, 1943)
Winged Scourge (Disney, US, 1943)
Hell-Bent For Election (UPA, US, 1944)
Keep Your Mouth Shut (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1944)
The Brotherhood of Man (UPA, US, 1945)
The Romance of Transportation in Canada (NFBC, Canada, 1952)
Ersatz (Dusan Vukotic, Yugoslavia, 1961)
The Hand (Jiri Trinka, Czechoslovakia, 1965)
342
Who Needs Nurseries? We Do! (Leeds Animation Workshop, UK, 1976)
Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, USSR, 1979)
Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1982)
Council Matters (Leeds Animation Workshop, UK, 1984)
The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1990)
Did I Say Hairdressing? I Meant Astrophysics (Leeds Animation Workshop, UK, 1998)
Teenage Grief (Leeds Animation Workshop, UK, 2007)

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Creator Roe, Annabelle Honess (author)

Core Title Animating documentary

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 09/24/2009

Defense Date 07/29/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag animation,Cinema,documentary,epistemology,film,Knowledge,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

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Advisor Renov, Michael (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Wilson, George (committee member)

Creator Email ajhroe@gmail.com,honess@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2612

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Rights Roe, Annabelle Honess

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