Abstract More frequently included in international festival line-ups, animated documentary films are sometimes presented as a result of the multiplication of hybrid forms of digital cinema in the new millennium. Their recent proliferation is hard to ignore, but they exist from the very beginnings of animation, in less sophisticated forms than nowadays, displaying very early the modern tendency of the medium to mix different techniques and include self-reflexive devices. This article tries to identify the reasons and the contexts that motivated the choice of this hybrid form and to identify its constant characteristics, mostly related to the depiction of personal and collective traumas. It looks at relevant theoretical and practical approaches of this phenomenon.
Keywords: animated documentary, history of animation, educational film, propaganda film,war film, Ari Folman, Anca Damian
A Centennial History
When committed to describing and theorizing the animated documentary phenomenon, we are probably trying hard to avoid the usual "rhetoric of frivolity” adopted in writing on animation, generally considered a child-oriented entertainment. Only specialized historians in animation cinema are aware of the adult target- public orientation of the first animated shorts, realized in the three decades before the arrival of sound. For instance, Annabel Honess Roe reminds us of “the long history of the hybridization of animation and documentary, one that stretches back to the earliest days of the moving image” (Honness Roe 2009:1).
Dramatic contexts, such as World War 1, generated animated films that approached the war theme. One of the most famous titles about the tragic consequences of the war is The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) by Winsor McCay, an animated documentary inspired by the cynical bombing of a civil transatlantic ship by a German submarine, which provoked the death of more than 1000 passengers, 128 of them Americans. The graphic style of the event reconstruction is realistic, inspired by the photos of the huge liner and of the numerous people that started from New York, with the destination London. The phases of the sinking are chronologically reproduced, insisting on the moment when the German submarine fires a torpedo at the Lusitania and on the desperate movements of the passengers running to catch the lifeboats. We watch then the ship tilting from one side to another and people falling into the ocean. One of the last shots, showing a mother struggling to keep her baby above the waves is an emotional conclusion, in contrast with the intertitle which ironically comments: ”The man who fired the shot was decorated by the Kaiser.” This early film is sometimes commented as a case of propaganda film, because it presents the event in a way that generates the public`s indignation and repulsion in front of the war atrocities. It evokes an unforgettable collective trauma.
This approach can clarify the very essence of the intersection of animation and documentary, as Annabel Honess Roe emphasizes:
While animation might at first seem to threaten the documentary project by destabilizing its claims to represent reality, I suggest that the opposite is the case. Animation, in part through its material differences from live-action film, seem shift and broadens the limits of what and how we can show about reality by offering new or alternative ways of seeing the world (…) It also has the potential to convey visually the “world in here” of subjective, conscious experience. (Honness Roe 2009:2)
The “subjective experience” refers to the intense emotion that an animated documentary, similar to The Sinking of the Lusitania might provoke. Paul Wells notices this early film “made in a newsreel way…filled viewers with anxiety through psychological projection’ and concludes it marks ‘a seminal moment in the development of the animation film, for its combination of documentary styles with propaganda elements” and considered it a prove that “animation is a form of Modernism”.(Wells 2002: 30)
Even Walt Disney combined animation and documentary in his feature Victory through Air Power (1944), as well as bearing accents of propaganda film. He strongly believed in cinema's duty to participate in the war efforts. Convinced by the decisive role played by the Air Force during World War 2, he produced this animation documentary to support Major Alexander de Seversky`s desire to build more bombs. Although not an animation documentary, the series Why We Fight? directed by Frank Capra and aimed to convince young Americans to enroll in the Army during WW2, including some animated scenes.
The hybrid form of animation documentary has proliferated more since the 1990s, especially after the presentation of the feature Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman, in the opening Gala of the Cannes Film Festival.
Waltz with Bashir and Trauma Representation
The Israelian film that won, in 2009, the Golden Globe for the best non-American production, is based on a very personal and traumatic experience of the author. Ari Folman (born 1962) was specialized in documentary and fiction films and decided to use animation language in order to express his confession as a participant in the Lebanon War and the September 1982 mass murders at Sabra and Shatila in Waltz with Bashir Bashir / Vals im Bashir). The presentation at Cannes generated great acclaims but also vivid controversy.
Ari Folman had already proved his interest in the representation of war with his graduation film at the Tel Aviv Film University Comfortably Numb (1991) about the first gulf War and the Israelites’ fear of chemical warfare. He followed this by directing several pieces on life in the occupied territories for Israeli television, mainly during the Second Intifada. In 1996 he made his first longform film, Saint Clara, an adaptation of Czechoslovakian author Pavel Kohout’s novel. His second feature film, Made in Israel, is a futuristic tale about the hunt for the last living Nazi, „a very stylish black and white film that came up short” by the author’s own statement. Folman only discovered animation in 2004 while making a series of television documentaries about love that contained several animated segments. In an interview for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma he confessed: “I was fascinated by the freeing power of animation (…) The neverending hunt for the sensational had wore me out. I wanted to look at documentary film as animation, a subjective creation; this fresh perspective freed me from the traditional constraints of the genre” (Renzi, Schweitzer, 2008:29-30). Through this hybridization of seemingly incompatible medias Waltz with Bashir was born. The director admits that the film is deeply rooted in his personal experience and views. The picture retells the experience of 17-year-old Ari Folman (having become a character) as he takes part in the occupation of West Beyrouth during the first Lebanese War. The author strives to trigger long-buried memories with the help of former war buddies.
In an interview for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma he confessed: “I was fascinated by the freeing power of animation (…) The neverending hunt for the sensational had worn me out. I wanted to look at documentary film as animation, a subjective creation; this fresh perspective freed me from the traditional constraints of the genre” (Renzi, Schweitzer, 2008:29-30). Through this hybridization of seemingly incompatible media Waltz with Bashir was born. The director admits that the film is deeply rooted in his personal experience and views. The picture retells the experience of 17-year-old Ari Folman (having become a character) as he takes part in the occupation of West Beyrouth during the first Lebanese War. The author strives to trigger long-buried memories with the help of former war buddies.
The film stylizes these ex-comrades-in-arms now at adulthood in animation based on filmed interviews. This process relied on the help of a team of animators that did not rely on motion capture technology in order to translate into animation archival footage and photographs. Rather, the team transposed these into poetic, dreamlike, and surrealist moments that attempt to dilate time and distort the perception of peril. Structured as an investigation, the film tries to establish the events of the night of 16-17 of December when the Israeli army that was guarding the camps of the Palestinian refugees allowed the Palestinian Christian phalanx to enter the camp and massacre the civilians. Despite the initial state of confusion, an international inquiry commission found the Israeli army guilty for the devastation of West Beirut, an operation during which thousands of civilians were killed. Waltz with Bashir becomes a trek through memory that challenges the beliefs of former comrade-in-arms now at maturity. The son of Nazi labor camp survivors, Ari Folman proved great courage by pursuing this highly controversial topic and by speaking about the guilt that his generation harbors. He frankly admits that his film is fully autobiographical. His starting point is very precise: at 40 years old he decided to reform so as to not serve in the army. He went to the army psychologist to talk about his military past. Firstly he talked about the Lebanese War and realized that he had completely repressed that memory and had not talked about it since he was 22. He then decided to track down his former comrades-in-arms and in talking to them saw the same phenomenon. He comments: "It wasn’t really amnesia, more like a subject far removed from our daily lives, probably in order to allow us to return to that life after that trauma. This defensive phenomenon is part of the collective Israeli history: many years after Shoah we avoided talking about the concentration camps like it were tabu.” (Renzi, Schweitzer, 2008:29-30)
Surprisingly opting for the freeing power of animation, the author manages to speak reserver yet movingly about the tragedy of war. The director’s option for animation in this incursion in memory is based on the medium’s ability to visualize the dilation of time. Without the power of animation, the film could never so expressively communicate the fears, nightmares, and guilt of the young men called to arms at an age where they did not fully understand what enemy they were fighting.
Waltz with Bashir is a hybrid film that invites us to verify how appropriate is another definition of animated documentary proposed by Annabelle Honnes Roe:
I would suggest that an audiovisual work (produced digitally, filmed or scratched on celluloid) could be considered an animated documentary if it: (i) has been recorded or created frame-by-frame; (ii) is about the world rather than a world wholly imagined by its creator;and (iii) has been presented as a documentary by its producers and/ or received as a documentary by audiences, festivals, critics. (Honnes Roe 2009:3)
This definition enlarges the number of films we could include in this category and this diversification was confirmed by the features selected in the 2020 edition of the Animest Film Festival of Bucharest for a sidebar dedicated to animated documentary.
Most of the films included in this program refer to dramatic moments of recent events in the recent history. They all speak about traumatic experiences, just like the mass massacre of the students and professors from Austin University, Texas, in 1966 (The Tower by Keith Mainland). Like other animation documentaries, the film includes live-action scenes, maybe meant to intensify the authenticity of the testimony. This practice is used by another film included in the mentioned selection, a hybrid feature about the treatment of an autism case with a methodic screening of Walt Disney’s films (Life, animated by Ross Williams). This film is to remind another animation documentary, A is for Autism (1987) by Tim Webb which explores the condition of autism through the medium of animation. As the theorist Paul Wells notices, "Animation is a particularly appropriate medium with which to reveal the condition of autism because it can represent in itself the introspective results of self-absorbed imaginative activity which is part of the distanced psychology of the autistic thinking.”(Wells, 1998: 124)
Probably one of the films that most efficiently employed this method is Zero Impunity by Nicholas Blies and Stephane Huebert Blies, an extraordinary indictment of "rape as a weapon of war”. Several torture methods are mentioned, which include sexual humiliation, documented with archival footage of recent history abuses such as in Guantanamo or during the Syrian war, or in Russian-Ukranian confrontations. The traumas caused by violence against women are often invoked, such as in Sheila Sofiani’s Survivors (1997), that makes use of real interviews with victims of domestic violence. According to film critic Giannalberto Bendazzi, the characteristics of this film can be described in the following:
The film is graphically illustrated with minimal line animation, evoking experiences that are harrowing(…)It includes voices of clinical therapists, acting as a mental health public service, yet also resists the level of art.” (Bendazzi, 2017: 36)
Although Sheila Sofiani’s film is made before Waltz with Bashir, the presence of the therapist places it in the same category of animated documentary which try to heal collective traumas.
Romanian approaches
The Anim’est Festival contributed vigorously to reviving the forces of Romanian animation in the new millennium, new authors presented their first works there. But the major recognition of the new Romania talents came from the most important festival on global animation map: the Crystal Prize for Best Feature Film at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival (Cannes Film Festival of animation) won in 2012 by Anca Damian with Crulic – the Path to Beyond/ Crulic – drumul spre dincolo/ Crulic. Later awarded at other important competitions, in Locarno, Istanbul, Seoul, and Cottbus, Anca Damian’s film (a co-production with Poland) is important not only for the aforementioned recognitions but also because it represents one of the major animation trends of the new millennium: the hybridization of animation with documentary. Based on a real case, the film tells the story of Claudiu Crulic, a Romanian convicted of a robbery he did not commit and imprisoned, without hope, in Poland. After his efforts to clarify his situation fail, Crulic goes on a hunger strike only to be ignored by both Romanian and Polish authorities and dies in prison. The narration of events never slips into melodrama, with humor always on its side, highlighted superbly by actor Vlad Ivanov’s voiceover.
The originality of the feature film put together by Anca Damian together with the young animators on the team is also noted by French critic Stéphane Dreyfus:
An implacable indictment against a Kafkaesque judicial system, Crulic was initially intended as a documentary. But the Romanian director preferred the language of animation that «gave her the freedom to tell this story in the most personal and expressive way possible». (…) Told through first person singular narration, the story lets Claudiu Crulic’s memories unfold, each fragment corresponding to a different animation technique (cut out paper, painted photographs, comic strip, etc). Little by little, the silhouette grows faint until the outlines disappear completely. (Dreyfus 2012)
The formula of the animated documentary seems to have agreed with the director Anca Damian, who has a solid background in the field of documentary. The second animated docu-drama she made, The Magic Mountain/ Muntele magic (2016, a Romania-France-Poland co-production, distinguished with over twenty international and national awards) is also based on a real biography, that of Polish Adam Jacek Winkler, a political refugee in the 1960s in Paris, known as a photographer and mountaineer artist who became a hero in the 1980s when fighting in Afghanistan with the mujahideen against the Soviets, under captain’s Massoud orders. The script, co-signed by Anca Damian and Anna Winkler, the main character’s daughter, steers clear from portraying Winkler as a noble knight, drawing attention to the contradictions of his existence. There are moments of humorous counterpoint in this film as well, which show how the man who climbed Mont-Blanc – the heroic fighter in Afghanistan, who lived with the idea of saving the world – perishes in a solitary ascent on the Mont Maudit mountain.
In the feature-length film Magic Mountain the director enriches her tools, mixing different animation techniques: cel animation, cut-outs, claymation, and animated photos, including footage shots discovered in amateur films or newsreels. Based on extensive documentation, the film traces Winkler’s path, by referring all the time to relevant political and historical contexts. It includes newsreel fragments about the Vietnam War, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, or the movements for civil rights of young people in Europa of the year 1968.
The narrative includes self-reflective moments such as the allusions to classic films, from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin to the death of the hero in the Polish drama Ashes and Diamonds/ Popiol i diament by Andrzej Wajda. Based on the cooperation of animators from Romania and Poland, Magic Mountain builds its visual story on authentic items: drawings, paintings, and photos created by the Polish fighter included in a very attractive collage. These are piece of the "real life” of the hero, that deliver the expected "truth” about Adam Jacek Winkler.
The animated documentary format became seductive and familiar for other Romanian directors, more and more interested to mix authentic events with their subjective reception mediated through animation. After Damian’s breakthrough in the Annecy festival, another important distinction went to a young man who also worked on The Magic Mountain team: Sergiu Negulici. He won here, in 2017, the Debut Film Award for the short film Splendida moarte accident/The Blissful Accidental Death. Negulici skilfully combined 2D and 3D animation techniques, to evoque an unknown episode of the personal life of Romanian Dada artists starting from the discovery, in recent times, of a love letter hidden behind an old lithograph in an antique shop. Narrated in a suspense tradition, the film describes the author’s investigations to discover who was the writer of the hidden letter and their real protagonists. He discovers a 105-year-old woman who is still alive (Medi Dinu), and learns from her details about the Dada artists she had frequented in the 1920s. The authentic voice of the woman intensifies the documentary side of the film, which manages to interweave autobiographical elements with symbolic representations of the universe of the evoked artists.
Another young artist, Cecilia Felmeri, approaches, in Matyas, Matyas (2012) the mixture of authentic interviews with animation representations of the interviewees using the theme of a radio program that unifies the characters’ statements, starting from the same questions: who was Matei Corvin, the prince whose statue is set in a central square of the city Cluj-Napoca. And the interest in animated documentaries continues, with new approaches, as we notice in the claymation short Sasha and Petre (2020) by Luca Istodor, inspired by the biography of the film director (specializes in documentary) Petre Sirin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books:
Books Bendazzi, Giannalberto (2018), Animation: A World History, vol 3, New York, Routledge
directing several pieces on life in the occupied territories for Israeli television, mainly during the Second Intifada. In 1996 he made his first longform film, Saint Clara, an adaptation of Czechoslovakian author Pavel Kohout’s novel. His second feature film, Made in Israel, is a futuristic tale about the hunt for the last living Nazi, „a very stylish black and white film that came up short” by the author’s own statement. Folman only discovered animation in 2004 while making a series of television documentaries about love that contained several animated segments. In an interview for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma he confessed: “I was fascinated by the freeing power of animation (…) The neverending hunt for the sensational had wore me out. I wanted to look at documentary film as animation, a subjective creation; this fresh perspective freed me from the traditional constraints of the genre” (Renzi, Schweitzer, 2008:29-30). Through this hybridization of seemingly incompatible medias Waltz with Bashir was born. The director admits that the film is deeply rooted in his personal experience and views. The picture retells the experience of 17-year-old Ari Folman (having become a character) as he takes part in the occupation of West Beyrouth during the first Lebanese War. The author strives to trigger long-buried memories with the help of former war buddies.
include sexual humiliation, documented with archival footage of recent history abuses such as in Guantanamo or during the Syrian war, or in Russian-Ukranian confrontations. The traumas caused by violence against women are often invoked, such as in Sheila Sofiani’s Survivors (1997), that makes use of real interviews with victims of domestic violence. According to film critic Giannalberto Bendazzi, the characteristics of this film can be described in the following:
The formula of the animated documentary seems to have agreed with the director Anca Damian, who has a solid background in the field of documentary. The second animated docu-drama she made, The Magic Mountain/ Muntele magic (2016, a Romania-France-Poland co-production, distinguished with over twenty international and national awards) is also based on a real biography, that of Polish Adam Jacek Winkler, a political refugee in the 1960s in Paris, known as a photographer and mountaineer artist who became a hero in the 1980s when fighting in Afghanistan with the mujahideen against the Soviets, under captain’s Massoud orders. The script, co-signed by Anca Damian and Anna Winkler, the main character’s daughter, steers clear from portraying Winkler as a noble knight, drawing attention to the contradictions of his existence. There are moments of humorous counterpoint in this film as well, which show how the man who climbed Mont-Blanc – the heroic fighter in Afghanistan, who lived with the idea of saving the world – perishes in a solitary ascent on the Mont Maudit mountain.__large.jpg)
