Beyond Self-Images: the Context and Development of Animated Documentaries, the Cornerstones of Mode

Ajanovi#-Ajan, Midhat. "Beyond Self-images: The Context and Development of Animated Documentaries, the Cornerstones of Modern Animation in Sweden." Global Animation Theory: International Perspectives at Animafest Zagreb. Ed. Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gili#, Holger Lang, Daniel Šulji# and Hrvoje Turkovi#. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 99–114. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337161.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 16:02 UTC. Copyright © Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gili#, Holger Lang, Daniel Šulji#, Hrvoje Turkovi#, and Contributors and Cover image Zlatka Salopek 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 7 Beyond Self- images The Context and Development of Animated Documentaries, the Cornerstones of Modern Animation in Sweden Midhat Ajanovi´ c -Ajan It seems that the fi rst decades of the new millennium have brought about a small renaissance of documentaries, especially those that combine live action and animated pictures and even those visualized totally by employment of various animation techniques. My concern in the following chapter is the conspicuous propensity in Swedish animation towards animated documentary. In my view Sweden is the country that, besides Canada and Great Britain, has developed the most prolifi c production of fi lms that merge documentary purposes and animated imagery. In this chapter I defi ne animated documentary, as I understand it. I will also take a look into the history of Swedish animation and documentary, with an emphasis on the features that might be the base for the development of the animated documentary. The text will also focus on some factors in the production and social background that, at least partly, explain why the animated documentary is such a prominent feature on the Swedish animation scene and, lastly, it will point at some fi lms and fi lmmakers that eminently represent the genre. 99 100 GLOBAL ANIMATION THEORY Non- photographic documentary It is a fairly usual misconception that animation is a depoliticized art form indifferent to reality. Actually quite the opposite is the case: some of the strongest stories of our time have been told through the medium of animated pictures. Owing to the animation method, which I defi ne elsewhere as an ‘accelerated metamorphosis’; 1 this art form is a unique means of dealing with some fundamental aspects of our existence and allows for the invisible to be seen. Animated fi lms often successfully present a form of pictorial microanalysis of a certain society and time; precise and ‘realistic’, so that they are faithful witnesses of the time and space they were made in, just as somebody’s caricature successfully presents the person’s face. An example could be the spirit of pessimistic resistance in a great number of animated, particularly puppet, fi lms made in Central Europe, a region forcefully drawn into the ‘Communist’ block during the Cold War era or the bizarre, nauseating political fantasies that questioned the social system and announced ‘perestroika’ made by Estonian artist Priit P ä rn and by Russian artist Igor Kovalyov. Another example is the connection between British society during the so- called ‘Thatcherism’ and the socially critical fi lms produced by Channel 4, etc. Most animated documentaries deal with the social and psychological condition of human existence in a wide socio- political context. Although the so- called ‘animated documentary’ 2 is a somewhat problematic conceptual blending, this genre has been established in both fi lm production and researches as well. Formerly an obscure sub- genre, animated documentaries have recently become a signifi cant phenomenon that has gained a strong momentum thanks to modern technological progress. As fi lm entered the digital age, animated documentaries have also grown in number from year to year. Simply put, an animated documentary could be defi ned as an animated fi lm made in accordance with the standards and conventions adopted in documentary fi lmmaking. In one of the very few comprehensive books on animated documentary, Annabelle Honess Roe, paraphrasing Bill Nichols, insists that we can characterize this type of animation as documentary because ‘it’s about the world rather than a world’ ( Honess Roe 2013 : 4). She also proposed several categories like mimetic, substitution, mnemic, evocation and so on The animated documentary occurred as a result of fi lmmakers’ timeless desire to depict in a believable way events that have not been caught on 1 For example in my book Animation and Realism ( Ajanovi c´ -Ajan 2004 ). 2 Of course, it is an unfortunate name just like ‘fi lm’, ‘comics’ or ‘video games’ but the good news is that people easily get used to unusual names. What was unusual yesterday is the norm today. BEYOND SELF- IMAGES 101 camera because: (1) they happened before fi lm was invented, (2) they are unfi lmable at the time, like space, or germs, or (3) no camera was present at a certain, important event. The fi rst case includes, for example, an entire sub- genre that might be dubbed ‘dinocumentaries’, stretching from Winsor McCay’s Gertie, the Trained Dinosaur (1914) and The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915) by Willis O’Brien, to the BBC -produced mini- series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) and onwards. For the materialization of the world of religions, by depicting goddesses, angels, devils, fairies and other similar creatures, French fi lmmakers used cinematic tricks and animation to reach beyond the limitations of cinematography, with its optical and chemical restraints. This sort of animated fi lm was further developed within educational fi lms in which the animation was used to visualize various science experiments and theories or to reconstruct historical events. Thus, the impossibility of fi lming some invisible parts of physical reality was compensated entirely with the help of different animation techniques, so fi lmmakers ‘showed’ for instance microbes and viruses that were ‘recorded’ with their rostrum camera. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Fleischer brothers in the United States made animated educational fi lms, which in the form of funny cartoons explained Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Probably the most interesting is the third case, which is usually the recreation of events that occurred in reality, but were not recorded. With his fi lm The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), Winsor McCay made a great contribution to this type of animated fi lm. The fi lm is a ‘documentary’ consisting of hand-drawn, animated images that very dramatically and convincingly reconstruct an actual incident and thus create the illusion of an eye- witness report. In this case, animation compensates for the absence of a camera at a historic event where a German submarine sank the passenger ship Lusitania . Actually, there have been quite a number of animated works that have reconstructed unfi lmed events since Lusitania and even before it. The reconstruction of historic events such as the visualization of old battles had started already with Cohl, for instance in The Battle of Austerlitz ( La Bataille d’ Austerlitz , 1909), and even Frank Capra’s crew incorporated animated parts in the documentary series Why We Fight (1942–1945), for instance for schematic presentation of Blitzkrieg . The Romance of Transportation in Canada (Collin Low, Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroiter and Tom Daly, 1953) as well as The Mighty River (Fr é d é ric Back, 1993) are examples of Canadian history recounted in the form of animated fi lm. Such fi lms are also A Song for Hiroshima (Renzo Kinoshita, 1978) an inside story on the Hiroshima inferno and Peter Mansfeld (Melocco Mikl ó s, 2007), about a falsely accused and executed young boy in the aftermath of Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. This fi lm is based on the court records, just like the feature length Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2007) that 102 GLOBAL ANIMATION THEORY uses 3D CGI in order to believably re- enact testimonies during the 1968 trial against anti- war activists in the United States. The dark side of human nature is distinctly captured in Silence (Orly Yadin, Silvie Bringas, 1998) based on the testimonies by poet and Holocaust survivor Tana Ross. We fi nd a more recent example for that type of animated documentary in Broken – The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck ( Kaputt , Volker Schlecht and Alexander Lahl, 2016), a powerful fi lm revealing the sordid conditions in a women’s prison in former East Germany. Former inmates Gabriele St ö tzer and Birgit Willschü tz unsentimentally recount everyday life in the prison, where the female inmates worked like slaves to produce export goods. The fi lm is evocative of the conditions humans lived in under a dictatorship now gone, while reminding us that such things occur even in this day and age. Visual biographies Another, very frequent subcategory of the animated documentary is the one in which narrative and historiographical perspectives are taken from the fi lmmaker’s personal experience. Those fi lms are usually distinguished by storytelling based on everyday realism and autobiographical narratives. In addition to the pictures coming from the imperfect time machine called memory that we all have in our heads, the credibility of depictions strengthens by the employment of authentic material, such as a person’s diary, testimonies, documents, photos and live- action footage. Such a fi lm was Drawn from Memory (1995), a feature made by the brilliant animator and cartoonist Paul Fierlinger, who collected his memories of growing up in the country of refugees, America, after his Central European Jewish family had managed to escape from the Holocaust. A similar issue was dealt with by Belgian artist Jung in his Approved for Adoption ( Couleur de peau: miel , Laurent Boile and Jung, 2012).

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