Animated Documentaries: The appeal of faking reality

I’ve been constantly discussing the idea of reality: what is it about the degree of reality portrayed in filmmaking that appeals so much? Today I’d like to talk about a genre that contradicts said idea, and as a result makes for some potent and interestingly visual story telling.

I found about animated documentaries in my hunt for a British-based animation production to talk about for my presentation, Animated Minds. But I’ll talk about that series in the next post. Let’s start with the definition of animation and documentary first.

Animation, if you use Google’s definition, is defined as “successive drawings or positions of puppets or models to create an illusion of movement when the film is shown as a sequence.” Documentaries on the other hand, are defined as “using pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a factual report on a particular subject.”

Documentaries, by nature, involve maintaining truthfulness and honesty. So to use a process that often fakes movement to get by sounds contradictory. Theorists studying this genre have noted it: Roe defines the animation-documentary relationship: “The former conjures up thoughts of comedy, children’s entertainment and folkloric fantasies; the latter carries with it the assumptions of seriousness, rhetoric and evidence.” (P.1). Landesman and Bendor concur, pointing out that: “It seems rather preposterous to attribute a film that deploys an array of non-realistic stylistic devices with the capacity to make powerful truth claims about reality […]” (2011, P.354).

However, the scope of what animation can do differently from traditional live-action documentaries is enticing to filmmakers. As Roe notes, animation offers an alternate look to reality from live-action: there’s a freedom to how filmmakers can document reality rather than the conventional methods of recording (P.2). But as Roe goes on to note, the greatest quality of an animated documentary is that because animators aren’t bound by the camera in front of them (profilmic), they can bring people and stories that are “temporally, spatially, and psychologically distant from view” closer together. It’s their recreation of reality, and they can capture stories alternatively from live action. It is at this point that I bring up my own work to demonstrate Roe’s point.

“Our Final Term Together” was an animated documentary I created in mid-2020 when the pandemic happened, a story of several students in their final year of Graphic Design university who had to find ways to adapt their projects to make from home.

I had no access to our usual studio, and couldn’t meet any of the participants in person, so we worked remotely to tell a story that went across both London and Wales and documented the world we experienced at that time. Because of animation, I got to make a documentary that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to because of spatial restrictions, bring emotions to the forefront through design, movement, storyboard, colour and sound. Undoubtably, the reality I portrayed isn’t the same as the one we lived, as the world was significantly stylised, but I did get to capture elements, thoughts and feelings I wouldn’t have if I sat everyone in a zoom call and told them to record themselves making work from home.

Now I can’t go on without mentioning that I make it sound easy to animate and recreate the world into a film-based reality. To achieve the same effect of putting a camera down in front of a setting and capturing a scene or an interviewee, it takes a great deal to recreate that by hand. To capture the body language or emotion of the participants like previously mentioned in the Sun & Moon studios post takes time, in my case, it took between April to June before I completed my 10-minute documentary. But at the same time, how we can things hidden from the camera such as emotions and mental battles are options we can pursue through animation.

My presentation will breakdown an external animated documentary, Animated Minds in due course, so I’ll be analysing how that series benefits from being animated over live action next time.

Landesman, O., Bendor, R., (2011) Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir, Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1746847711417775

Roe, A., H., (2013) Animated Documentary, Palgrave MacMillan