Evocative animated documentaries, imagination and knowledge

Imaginative Animated Non-Fiction: Educating Adults about Child Soldiers

“…As Arroyo Quiroz et al (2020: 163) state succinctly, documentary scholarship is generally ‘centred on the medium’s truth claims and evaluates films according to their ability to articulate a persuasive and well-documented discourse about the “real” world’, whether films are seen to work through mimesis or to construct reality as an ideological effect, while the discourse of useful cinema ‘decentre[s] the truth claim that sustains the documentary project’ and shifts the focus to the work of social actors such as filmmakers, intellectuals, artists, and institutions ‘translating or mediating institutional discourses to specific audio-visual narratives comprehensible to audiences’ (p. 164, emphasis in original). This distinction between scholarly approaches is extended, in Honess Roe’s (2013: 4) work, to institutional and public discourse: for her, a documentary must be framed and received as such, and does not include useful cinema such as educational and public service films. However, these distinctions are not immutable: while Child Soldiers is not generally framed as a documentary, when I proposed the label to Boyter (2018, personal communication) because of the research questions I had in mind, he agreed immediately that it could apply.…”

“…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.…”

“…When do we see individuals, whose idiosyncrasy is germane, and when do individuals represent more general categories and classes of people? Mimetic substitution can represent either: Honess Roe (2013) does not distinguish between the representation in Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2007) of the actions of specific individuals at a singular place and time, and the ways individuals in Walking with Dinosaurs (Tim Haines, Mary Clare Bacquet, and Jasper James, 1999) represent whole species. In temporal terms, the events of Chicago 10 happened (past tense), whereas those of Walking with Dinosaurs could have happened (past conditional tense) exactly as pictured but did not.…”

“…This resonates with the psychic power that several writers ascribe to reenactment. However, Williams (1993) and Nichols (2008), as well as Ward (2019) and Honess Roe (2013), generally see the reenactment’s reference to a specific lost or past event to be central to its psychic power. For instance, Nichols (2008) writes that, when watching a reenactment, the ‘viewer experiences the uncanny sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique ’ (p. 74, emphasis added).…”

The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution

“…In the last two decades, animation studies has witnessed a growing interest in animated documentary, an animated form that works with factual content. This trend inspired vibrant conversations about animated documentary’s representational, political, and social aspects, producing such volumes as Animated Realism: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre (Kriger, 2011), Animated Documentary (Honess Roe, 2013), Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema (Murray and Ehrlich, 2018), and Animating Truth: Documentary and Visual Culture in the 21st Century (Ehrlich, 2021). Despite this apparent proliferation of literature, the history of this animated mode, as Cristina Formenti rightly points out in her book The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution , remains largely underrepresented in animation scholarship (p. 3).…”