History & Film | Why Animated Documentaries Matter

WRITTEN BY ALEXANDER K. SMITH

Many of the interviews featured in Waltz with Bashir were shot in live action, which was later animated using a combination of digital painting and Flash animation. This led to a common misconception that rotoscoping was used in numerous scenes in order to achieve the film’s unique realist aesthetic.

I remember the exact moment that I began to take animated documentaries seriously. I was a first year Master’s student at Oxford University with a head full of theory, very little practical experience, and an absolute certainty that I knew exactly what documentary filmmaking was all about. I was, of course, quite wrong.

On an idle morning in October 2008, I decided to go to a screening of Ari Folman’s pseudo-biographical documentary, Waltz with Bashir, and never saw animation the same way again. The film, which explores the themes of memory and post-war trauma, uses a combination of flash, traditional, and 3D animation, moving from a grounded realism in its present-day interviews to a more surreal quality when the interviewees discuss their memories and experiences as Israeli soldiers in the 1982 Lebanese Civil War. In the final scene, the animation suddenly fades away, dissolving into live action archival footage of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. For many critics, this signifies the protagonist’s willingness to confront his repressed memories, coming to terms with the reality of his actions in the military.

Sitting in the theatre, however, overwhelmed by the film’s aesthetically beautiful and often gut-wrenching artwork, I couldn’t help but read something else into the sudden transition from animation to live action footage. The flexibility of the conventions of animation allowed the filmmaker to explore his relationship to the past and his psychological trauma in a way that felt more compelling and, frankly, more tangible than real-world archival footage ever could. To adapt Robert Peaslee to my purposes, I realized that the film was more than a meditation on memory and trauma.¹ It was also a critique of photographic realism and the role of animation in documentary filmmaking itself.

In generic terms, documentaries strive to represent real-world events with a high level of fidelity, which is typically achieved through realism; while animation, for much of its history in Western filmmaking, has been used to create and explore fictional worlds, which led to a pervasive cultural sentiment that animation is not well-suited to non-fiction. Waltz with Bashir is one of a handful of animated documentary films made between 2007 and 2009 that upended this sentiment for critics and theorists, helping to establish animation as a powerful tool in telling non-fictional stories.² Following the recent success of animated films like Tower (2016) and Flee (2021), which received multiple Academy Award nominations including Best Documentary and Best Animated Feature, I don’t think that it’s an overstatement to say that animation is gaining mainstream acceptance as a way of representing the ‘real’.

These days, with my university years long behind me, I am the writer and co-producer of an animated historical documentary series of my own, called The Animated History of Tibet (more on that below). Working as a historian on the series and collaborating closely with animators, I often find myself returning to Waltz with Bashir and the sentiment that I first felt in 2008: Relative to live action footage, in some cases, animation is simply more evocative in the way that it represents the real world. And, as animated documentaries continue to grow in popularity, I can’t help but wonder why. Why is animation such an effective tool in representing our history and in teaching us about the past?

Well, for one thing, as any fan of anime will tell you, one of the great strengths of animation is that it allows us to depict things that can’t be filmed using practical effects. A director can create anything that they can imagine (within the limitations of their budget, of course). Whether it’s the iconic nuclear infernos of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) or the claustrophobic surrealism of Jason Loftus’ magnificent Eternal Spring (2022), animation excels at representing objects that are difficult, if not impossible, to film. As an artform, this provides a number of advantages, one of which is that animation is an ideal medium for depicting rare historical settings, which are often prohibitively expensive for live action productions to faithfully reproduce. Most of us, after all, don’t have Netflix money.

Speaking from my own experience, this is also a quality that makes animated documentary an ideal medium for telling the histories of socially marginalized groups that would otherwise be difficult to film. The history of Tibet, as it so happens, is an excellent example. For over seventy years, Tibet has been occupied by the People’s Republic of China, which rigorously polices access to ethnic Tibetan regions and has gone to great lengths to penalize Western production companies that make films critical of Chinese state historical narratives. If you’re interested in how they do this and the way that it affects the US market, go ahead and google: “Disney’s groveling apology to China for distributing Martin Scorsese’s Kundun”. You won’t be disappointed.

The geographical and practical political inaccessibility of Tibet, combined with the fact that a significant part of the Tibetan population lives in exile, spread across India, North America, and Europe, means that live action films that take place in Tibet and feature Tibetan-speaking actors are few and far between. I should note that there is a small and tremendously talented community of Tibetan filmmakers, which includes the late, great Pema Tseden (1969-2023); however, with a handful of exceptions, period pieces and good faith historical documentaries set in Tibet are exceptionally rare.

Enter ANIMATION, screen right. Using traditional animation as a medium, we can sidestep these problems entirely. Having built a small brain trust composed of cultural consultants and fellow historians, we’re able to collaborate with an animation team to represent the complex material culture of Tibet and the Tibetan landscape across more than one-thousand years of history. Our only real obstacles in that regard are issues of style and the ever-present albatross of staying on budget.

Flee (2021) intersplices its subtle, realist visual key with highly abstract 2D charcoal animated sequences, which resonated powerfully with me on a first viewing – in no small part because of their stark contrast with the rest of the film.

The value of animation to documentary and history, however, goes far beyond cost cutting measures and the flexibility of its visual aesthetics. Animation can also provide anonymity, protecting a protagonist’s identity while still allowing the audience to fully visualize and empathize with their character. This can be of profound importance to refugees and political dissidents who would otherwise risk reprisals for their participation. This is the case, for instance, in Jonas Rasmussen’s Flee (2021). Amin Nawabi, the main character, is a pseudonym, concealing the identity of the film’s protagonist as he relates his experiences as a refugee, fleeing his home country of Afghanistan to finally settle in Denmark. The film focuses on Amin’s personal journey and his recollections of the past. And, much like Waltz with Bashir, uses a mixture of grounded realism to depict the present day and a variety of abstract, almost surreal animation styles in representing his past experiences to the audience. This blending of styles (executed seamlessly in Flee) is another profound strength of animation as a storytelling medium, which is often overlooked in the theoretical literature on documentary filmmaking.

Where traditional documentaries might rely on archival footage, black and white segments, or creative camerawork and editing to communicate a break in tone to establish emotional resonance, animation allows for an enormous degree of creative latitude in how human emotion and memory are represented visually. The ability of animated documentaries to retain their historical credibility while changing visual styles is well established and, looking at a cross-section of feature films released in the past decade, appears to be part of the genre’s emerging visual lexicon.

Throughout The Animated History of Tibet we’ve opted for a realist aesthetic that draws inspiration, in part, from the landmark US series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008).

While I may, admittedly, wax a bit poetic about the versatility of animation in teaching history, by way of conclusion, I should also mention that there are significant shortcomings with the medium, as well. For some documentary directors – and independent creators making historical videos on platforms like YouTube – animation often serves an entirely pragmatic rather than stylistic end. And as animation continues to emerge as a legitimate means of depicting factual events, online communities are increasingly overwhelmed with animated content, much of which is low-effort and reflects a poor understanding of history. That’s not to mention the potential propagandist uses of animated history, of which there are many, or the effects of generative AI on the way that animated documentaries are both understood and viewed by audiences conditioned by market-driven content. Despite all of these issues, however, I remain highly optimistic about the future of animation in both science communication and historical documentary filmmaking. Even on YouTube, there is still enormous latitude to move the medium forward, passing through the current glut of algorithmically driven content towards a new generation of visually compelling, critical, and accurate historical media.

References:

1. Peaslee, Robert Moses. 2011. “It’s Fine as Long as You Draw, But Don’t Film”: Waltz with Bashir and the Postmodern Functions of Animated Documentary” in Visual Communication Quarterly 18.4, pp.223-235.
2. Ryan 2004, Persepolis (2007), Chicago 10 (2007), and Slaves (2008), in particular, come to mind.

About the contributor: Dr. Smith holds a PhD in the anthropology of Tibet and the Himalayas from the University of Paris, France, and an MA in Tibetan studies from Oxford University. In association with Tibet House US, he is the co-producer of The Animated History of Tibet.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 107 (February 2024)