Animated Documentary

203 Pages·2013·3.161 MB·English

by  Annabelle Honess Roe (auth.)

Animated Documentary
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Animated Documentary
Annabelle Honess Roe
© Annabelle Honess Roe 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN 978-1-349-43709-2 ISBN 978-1-137-01746-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137017468
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Animation and documentary’s shared history 5
Scope and organisation 13
1 Representational Strategies 17
How animation is used in animated documentary 22
The ontology of animated documentary 27
2 Digital Realities 41
Dino-docs and strategies of visual and aural authentication 45
T racing the sights and sounds of reality in
Rotoshop and Chicago 10 55
Paratextual authentication 65
The excess of animated realism 67
3 Animated Interviews 74
Uncanny bodies 80
Absence as representational strategy 87
The expressive power of the disembodied voice 97
4 The World in Here 106
M ore than the interview seen:
Sheila Sofian’s illustrated interviews 112
Inside out: animating subjective experience 117
Hybrids of reality 124
Animated awareness 135
5 Animated Memories 139
(Dis)continuities: the self in history 146
T he unspoken and the forgotten: the trauma
in/of history in Silence and Waltz with Bashir 155
Afterword 170
Notes 174
Bibliography 180
Index 189
v
List of Figures
I.1 The Sinking of the Lusitania (dir. Winsor McCay, 1918) 7
1.1 American Homes (dir. Bernard Friedman, 2011) 35
2.1 Planet Dinosaur (dir. Nigel Paterson, 2011) 50
2.2 Chicago 10 (dir. Brett Morgen, 2007) 57
2.3 Grasshopper (dir. Bob Sabison, 2003) 62
3.1 Roadhead (dir. Bob Sabiston, 1998) 86
3.2 It’s Like That (dir. Southern Ladies Animation Group, 2003) 91
3.3 His Mother’s Voice (dir. Dennis Tupicoff, 1997) 98
4.1 Survivors (dir. Sheila Sofian, 1997) 114
4.2 A nimated Minds: The Light Bulb Thing
(dir. Andy Glynne, 2003) 120
4.3 A Is for Autism (dir. Tim Webb, 1992) 127
4.4 Ryan (dir. Chris Landreth, 2004) 130
5.1 Irinka and Sandrinka (dir. Sandrine Stoïanov, 2007) 153
5.2 Silence (dir. Sylvie Bringas & Orly Yadin, 1998) 159
5.3 Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, 2008) 164
vi
Acknowledgements
I could not have conceived of or completed this book without the help
and support of a number of people. I first started working on this topic
as a doctoral student in the Critical Studies programme of the School
of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. I have my
advisor, Michael Renov, to thank for introducing me to animated docu-
mentary and subsequently encouraging me to explore the boundaries
of the documentary canon and for his continued support of my work.
I continue to be grateful to Akira Lippit, George Wilson, Sheila Sofian,
David James, Rick Jewell and Vanessa Schwartz for their support and
guidance during my time at USC. Members of my student cohort have
remained wonderful friends and sources of intellectual and moral sup-
port and Kristen Fuhs, Christopher Hanson and Jorie Lagerwey have
generously given up their time to read and comment on parts of the
manuscript.
Colleagues within the School of Arts at the University of Surrey
have provided an environment in which my scholarship on animated
documentary could develop. Helen Hughes’ capacity for astute clarity
has been much appreciated, and she, along with Hing Tsang and Lois
Davis, has offered many stimulating conversations on documentary. I
am grateful to Sherril Dodds and Rachel Fensham for their mentorship
that has proved so valuable in the realisation of this book. The students
to whom I teach documentary and animation studies offer a fresh per-
spective and insight, and continually reinvigorate my passion for the
subject.
The communities of scholars that make up the Society for Animation
Studies and attend the annual Visible Evidence documentary confer-
ence have provided vibrant and thought-provoking discussion and
debate that has nurtured my work. In particular Paul Ward, Paul Wells,
Caroline Ruddell, Nichola Dobson, Brian Winston, Patrick Sjöberg
and Joshua Malitsky have been sources of great encouragement over
the years. I am very grateful to the filmmakers and animators who
have so willingly and generously shared their work and their thoughts
with me both when I was working on my PhD and whilst writing this
book, especially Liz Blazer, David Sproxton, Jonathan Hodgson, Marjut
Rimminen, Bob Sabiston, Dennis Tupicoff, Orly Yadin, Samantha
Moore, Ellie Land, Ruth Lingford and Shira Avni. Sections of this work
vii
viii Acknowledgements
have been published in different versions in the following: Uncanny
Indexes: Rotoshopped Interview as Documentary. Animation: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (1) (March 2012), Sage; Absence, Excess and
Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of
Animated Documentary. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (3)
(November 2011), Sage.
Thank you to my family and friends for continuing to be my great-
est supporters and cheerleaders. Most importantly, to my husband, best
friend and all-round favourite person Nick Roe, who never lets me give
up and always believes I can do it, this one’s for you.
Introduction
Animation and documentary make an odd couple. Theirs is a marriage
of opposites, made complicated by different ways of seeing the world.
The former conjures up thoughts of comedy, children’s entertainment
and folkloric fantasies; the latter carries with it the assumptions of seri-
ousness, rhetoric and evidence. The long history of the hybridisation
of animation and documentary, one that stretches back to the earliest
days of the moving image, belies the incongruity of their pairing and
suggests that, as in many things in life, opposites can attract in a mean-
ingful way. Animation has long been used in non-fictional contexts to
illustrate, clarify and emphasise, and animated segments have featured
in non-fiction films ranging from Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series
(1942–5) to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002). It is since
the 1990s, however, that we have seen an increase in the production
of what has become known as the ‘animated documentary’. As well
as appearing in the line-up of animation and documentary festivals
worldwide with increasing frequency and prominence, feature-length
animated documentaries have received mainstream theatrical releases –
for example, Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2007) and Waltz with Bashir (Ari
Folman, 2008) – and digital animation has been a staple of primetime
television documentary series since prehistory was brought back to life
by the BBC in Walking with Dinosaurs (Tim Haines and Jasper James,
1999).
In Animated Documentary, I explore a wide array of examples of ani-
mated documentary and question the implications of the use of anima-
tion as a representational strategy in documentary. In order to address
this question, I look at the ways animation is used in animated docu-
mentary: what and how is the animation representing; how and why
is animation being used instead of the conventional alternative?1 This
1