Animated Documentary and the Reclamation of Lost Pasts and Forgotten Memory in Irinka and Sandrinka and Waltz with Bashir

Approaching Reflexivity in Animated Documentary through a Spatial Taxonomy: An Analysis of Polonia (2023)

“…Photography and live action footage, in their capacity to act both as index and icon of the physical world, have long been considered the de facto documentary media. However, since the 1970s, photography’s evidentiary status has been challenged with legitimate arguments regarding how the medium’s truth-claims are compromised both through the subjectivity, fallibility and agendas of those who capture photographic images, as well as through its technical limitations in depicting the physical world (Ehrlich, 2021: 38, Honess Roe, 2013: 32).…”

“…The various documentary modes, as conceptualized by Nichols (2017), cover a full spectrum of creative approaches to engaging with a subject, from those that emphasize narrative (the expository mode) to those with more overtly formalist concerns (the poetic mode). As Honess Roe (2013: 2) has pointed out, animated documentaries are usually created by animators, 3 who interpret the world graphically and kinetically, and who approach their subject matter with a formal bias. This approach is not unique to animators: there are many examples of live-action film directors with formalist preoccupations.…”

“…In other instances, elements from the archival and cinematic spaces are merged and demonstrate animation’s ability to compress both space and time. Honess Roe (2013: 22) notes that animation, operating outside the indexical limitations of ‘conventional documentary, has the capacity to represent temporally, geographically and psychologically distal aspects of life beyond the reach of live action’. Polish animator Zbigniew Rybczyński contends that time compression can be seen throughout the history of art, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the Gothic period, where all the stages in the life of Christ were depicted in one image and is a visual representation of ‘how the thought process works’ (Rybczynski, cited in Kremski, cited in Rogoff, 2021: 101).…”

Imaginative Animated Non-Fiction: Educating Adults about Child Soldiers

“…The mixing of these modes and conventions and the role of personal lived experience raise a final question about non-fiction film: the relation between time and modes of substitution. Several writers have effectively addressed the tangles of time in both animated (Honess Roe, 2013; Ward, 2018) and live-action (Nichols, 2008; Williams, 1993) non-fiction representations of past events, and this is also crucial to the Child Soldiers video. The final testaments from Dallaire and Bangura provide evidence of the lived past and psychic present, and the animated sequences are implicitly fictionalized amalgams of experiences they and others have had.…”

Flee: Sounds of Fright and Flight

“…Animated documentaries have existed since the early days of film, with the first animated documentary considered to be The Sinking of the Lusitania by Winsor McCay in 1918 (Honess Roe 2013: 6). In the years since, animated documentaries and autobiographies have only grown in popularity, particularly since the 1990s (Honess Roe 2013: 1), with notable and award-winning examples being the French Persepolis (Satrapi and Paronnaud 2007) dealing with the history of Iran, the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) about the 1982 Lebanon war, and more recently the Danish Flugt [ Flee ] (Rasmussen 2021) dealing with a flight from the war(s) and regime in Afghanistan. Still, the idea that you can present a documentary or autobiography in the form of an animated film seems almost paradoxical, and the live-action medium is still the dominant mode for audiovisual non-fiction.…”