The use of animation in NGOs’ audio-visual communication about solidarity and migration

Introduction

In this article, I will lay the groundwork for studying the use of animation in online audio-visual communication by NGOs, and more specifically in the examples concerning solidarity towards migrants. I will especially focus on the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ that began in Europe in 2015 with the massive arrival of asylum seekers fleeing the conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq. In fact, insistence on the alarmist concept of ‘crisis’ further amplified the media, political and humanitarian attention that the migration phenomenon ¹ was already provoking. This amplification has affected media representations, solidarity aid and political discourse, often in a conflicting manner. In their joint letter addressed to European leaders in 2017, 162 NGOs signed their denunciation of the contrasts between the democratic values proclaimed by Europe and the policies applied to immigrants. ² This great humanitarian blockade reacted in particular to the many politicians who criminalised and persecuted NGOs with the accusation of actively contributing to the illegal entry of refugees into Europe and to the human trafficking managed by the smugglers. On this oppositional basis, as highlighted by the NGO Refugee Rights Europe, humanitarian action built an image of resistance and an ideological counter-discourse based on equality, on the universalism of human rights, on the collection and dissemination of alternative information and on civil collaboration. ³

Which humanitarian actors are taking action in this regard? First, in the world of solidarity towards migrants, we can recall that most of the humanitarian organisations do not deal exclusively with migrants’ rights but with human rights in a more general way: this is the case of decisive actors such as Oxfam, Care, Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee, UNICEF, Médecins sans Frontières, Amnesty, Caritas or Human Rights Watch. Secondly, we can find a series of humanitarian organisations that have been created with the specific aim of focussing on aid to migrants. Among these, a growing group of NGOs has increased its influence: SOS Méditerranée, PICUM, Sea Watch, Refugee Rights Europe (which has recently closed down), Transnational Migrant Platform, Migrant Voice, CIRE, Committee on Migration and all the so-called Refugee Councils, especially in Northern Europe (Norwegian Refugee Council, Danish Refugee Council, Finnish Refugee Council, Dutch Refugee Council). However, the largest and most influential actors are the NPOs (Non Profit Organizations) linked to the United Nations, such as UNHCR and IOM, which are also the most prolific in terms of communication, including audio-visual and animation. The reason is structural. As Thrall et al. (2014: 148) remind us, although the digital age has made it more accessible to use communication tools and interact with users, the central problem of global communication remains the need to possess significant resources – economic, technical, relational, political – in order to be visible in the crowd of the digital space and to capture public attention.

In this paper, I will select some representative examples of the digital audio-visual communication of these organisations in order to identify and observe the role of animation in humanitarian communication. In fact, the period taken into consideration, the one that starts from the refugee crisis in 2015 and goes up to the present day, coincides not only with the emergence of a whole series of new humanitarian actors dealing with migration issues, but also with the growing popularity of animated audio-visual communication. Is the use of animation transforming the representation of diversity by NGOs and the construction of the image of the migrant in the media? The present study will compensate for what I believe to be an important absence in the existing scholarly literature: while numerous analyses have focused on the role of the media in communicating the refugee crisis (Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2017), and a few rare texts have introduced the study of the use of animation in the treatment of the migration issue (Fevry, 2016), there is as yet no research that has explored the increasingly influential adoption of animation in the field of audio-visual and solidarity communication concerning the refugee crisis and migrations. The theoretical framework of my analysis will be that of Distant Suffering Studies, for grasping the fundamental role that visual representations and communicative strategies play in the world of humanitarian aid (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2006), and that of Animation Studies, for understanding the different qualities and applications of animation techniques (Walden, 2014; Wells, 1998). Methodologically, the corpus will be approached through both discourse and visual analysis, comparing live-action videos with animation videos in order to discuss the efficiency of this language in solidarity communication.

Humanitarian communication, the media and the migrant

Keck and Sikkink (1998) had already underlined how essential media communication is in humanitarian work: ‘Although NGO influence often depends on securing powerful allies, their credibility still depends in part on their ability to mobilise their own members and affect public opinion via the media’ (pp. 22–23). In relation to NGO communication, Orgad (2015) describes four key strategies: ‘underlining difference’ (through ‘othering’ tropes such as exoticisation or infantilisation), ‘celebrating difference’ (transforming the other from victim to hero), ‘mitigating difference’ (through the presence of a Western ‘mediator’ who softens the other’s perceived difference) and ‘erasing difference’ (familiarising the other by representing him or her with a Westernising connotation). All four strategies focus on the beneficiary’s otherness and impose a clear separation, whose distance is negotiable, between the audience and the beneficiary. However, Chouliaraki (2016) has identified a significant transition in the contemporary discourse of solidarity. The classical model, she argues, was based primarily on an objective representation of suffering (a contemplation of the experience of the other), an ‘ethic of pity’, a ‘negative imagery’ (the victimisation of the other), a ‘common humanity’ morality, a ‘needs-based approach’ and a goal of justice. The new contemporary model, on the other hand, is based on a subjective representation of suffering (the experience of the other invites contemplation of our own condition), an ‘ethic of irony’, a ‘positive imagery’ (the heroism of the other), a self-oriented morality, a self-reflexive structure, an ‘inspiration-based approach’ and an objective of authenticity. According to Chouliaraki (2016), these transformations in solidarity communication reflect a ‘new emotionality’ that places the Self and the direct relationship between ‘How I feel’ and ‘What I can do’ at the heart of moral action (p. 362). In the analysis of the videos, we will see how the two models of solidarity are both present, between a victimisation that is sometimes tinged with heroism, and an urgency based on the need for justice that also encompasses an inspirational appeal to the role of a universal Us.

Another new element in the representation of diversity in humanitarian communication is the inclusion of a new beneficiary: the migrant. Whereas the classic beneficiary of visual humanitarian aid campaigns (children and women victims of famine, wars, diseases and disasters) is perceived exclusively by the public as a suffering victim and belonging to a distant context, the migrant is perceived in the media as both a threat and a victim, and as a subject that creates a bridge between the distant context and the local Western society. This changes the intended communication strategy: aid will not only be requested as a humanitarian gesture of compassion towards a distant society, but also as a political gesture towards our society, as a transformation of a dominant stigmatising discourse. This is also why the victimising dimension is present: to erase the dangerous connotation of threat, solidarity communication highlights migrants’ inoffensiveness and victimhood (while trying to valorise, at times, their agency).

While immigration has been a ubiquitous media object in Europe especially since the turn of the 2010s, according to Krzyzanowski et al. (2018: 5) the emergence of the ‘refugee crisis’ after 2015 has indeed undergone even more of a process of politicisation and mediatisation. Politicisation has directed any discourse on this phenomenon towards a radical ideologisation and takeover of it by public and governmental power, which has implied a further polarisation of the social conflict. Mediatisation has brought about a change in political practices and communication, as they entered into a gradual process of mediated attention-seeking (through all the media) rather than focussing on policy making, with the consequence of an increasing mediated hegemonic political control (Krzyzanowski et al., 2018: 7). Chouliaraki et al. (2017: 29) spoke of a ‘regime of symbolic bordering’ when commenting on the ability of media communication to frame the existence of refugees within the confines of European borders, with the goal of ‘ordering and controlling migrants’ bodies but also agency’.

Adopting Malkki’s (1995) concept of ‘strategic silence’, Nikunen (2020) has analysed the media strategies that fuel a sharp contrast between the excessive noise and visibility of tragic migration headlines and the silence and invisibility of the reasons, stories and confusions that exist behind these headlines. Two of these strategies are partially used by NGO communication as well, even with some nuances that we will stress later. The first strategy is ‘numeric dehumanisation’: the communication of a complex phenomenon involves an attempt at quantitative calculation and computer graphics, because by reducing the migrant to a statistical number it seems as if the problem is being managed. In contrast to the first, the second strategy, she writes, can be defined as ‘de-politicised sentimentality’, as it privileges heart-breaking stories and representations of a victimised and vulnerable humanity, while contributing to ‘short-term sentimental solidarity rather than political solidarity with long-term action’ (Nikunen, 2020: 420–421).

NGO’s communication and animation

Through this first chapter, we have thus observed the contextual bases of our corpus: NGOs needed to change their representation of difference and suffering, to include the migrant as a beneficiary of aid and to oppose the mainstream media representations of migrants. Now, through the examples of the videos, we will see how these aspects are articulated through the adoption of a specific audio-visual language: animation.

The choice of animation as a communication technique is not surprising. By making a historical excursus along the uses of animation in documentary communication in various sectors such as military propaganda, education, corporate, commercial and ethnographic essay, Ceccarelli (2014: 136) demonstrated how animation is ‘a particularly suitable medium for the delivery of informative contents’. Discussing today’s uses, Ceccarelli highlights how, due to its technical and economic accessibility, versatility and expansion in all ICTs, animation has become one of the most innovative emerging fields in the arena of global contemporary communication. Its application in the audio-visual field related to the theme of migration is a more recent trend. In my article ‘Animation et migration. La mémoire autobiographique diasporique dans les documentaires animés’ (Scafirimuto, 2023), I showed the characteristics that, especially in autobiographical documentaries, make animation a particularly effective language in the treatment of migration issues: the hybridisation of the form, the exaltation of subjective imagination, the juxtaposition and the reconstruction of the absence. In this new article, I will continue this analysis in order to assess whether the choice of animation can effectively transform the media representation of migrants and humanitarian communication strategies concerning diversity. Starting from a visual data might seem secondary, but, like Chouliaraki (2016: 361), I also believe that ‘changes in aesthetics of humanitarian are also changes in the ethics of solidarity’.

Regarding the production, the videos are the result of a collaboration with a motion designer or an animation agency, but the names of these are hardly mentioned in the description of the post, and even less in the end credits. Distribution is mainly on YouTube, more rarely on Facebook and only more recently on Instagram (still few, shorter videos), with a link that can also be transferred to the official website. The reception in social networks – views, likes, comments, shares – is obviously proportional to the presence of the organisation in the mainstream media, to its size, its means and its notoriety. In our corpus, as of today, the most viewed video published by SOS Méditerranée (whose YouTube channel has 4640 subscribers) received for instance 13,546 views, 46 likes and 14 comment, whereas the video published by Unicef (whose YouTube channel has 602,000 subscribers) received 182,578 views and 1132 likes (comments are disabled because of child content). However, all the organisations we will be dealing with, even if they have a visibly heterogeneous importance and impact, are all big enough to have a budget to invest in a communication campaign that includes an animated video.

The videos of the selected corpus vary in length from about 20 seconds to 6 minutes, with a prevalence of 1–2 minutes per each. As for the animation techniques employed, most of the videos create a layered mix of text, diagrams, icons, vignettes, maps and figures in digitalised traditional 2D animation, but there are some rare examples of 3D stop-motion, children’s drawing animation, hand-drawn whiteboard animation and mix of animation and live action. Aesthetically, each video follows the personal and unique style and line of its creator, but one can distinguish a progressive visual scale that goes, according to Walden’s terms (2014), from ‘fullness’ (a greater quantity and precision of details) to ‘sketchedness’ (rougher and less realistic). Finally, at the narrative level, the scale ranges from macro-narrative (general data on an argument) to micro-narrative (a singular, individual story), depending on the communication strategies adopted.

The set of results, depending on the main functions, already makes it possible to divide the corpus into two categories: educational videos – which explain a specific issue (rights, work, rescue, violence, integration, gender, etc.) related to the targetted beneficiary (refugee, undocumented migrant, woman, child, etc.) in order to present the organisation as a whole or one of its missions – and storytelling videos – which illustrate the direct or indirect testimony of the beneficiary. The first category – which is the most common in NGO communication – clearly chooses a more objective approach in the way of exposing data, figures and general issues related to the crisis, while the second one favours a more subjective and intimate approach, through the creative representation of a personal story. The educational videos have a general structure divided into a first part dedicated to the exposition of the current problems and a second part focused on the possible solutions proposed by the humanitarian missions, while the storytelling videos are more freely adapted to the witness’s narrative.

Educational videos are part of a growing educational audio-visual trend on the Internet, as we can see through other similar animated educational videos on immigration published on YouTube by different channels devoted to geography or politics, for example. The storytelling videos are part of a process that Chouliaraki (2016) calls the ‘invitation to self-expression’, deriving from the new trend towards interactivity, criticism of the mechanisms of ‘othering’ and ‘compassion fatigue’ because of ‘the public’s apathy to traditional iconographies of suffering’ (p. 368). Particularly in the last 10–15 years, with communication increasingly transferred to social networks and new media, the need to accompany the breaking down of ‘us and them’ dichotomies with ‘positive imagery’ through the direct voice of beneficiaries has been one of the priorities of the humanitarian world. However, as Cooper (2015) points out, ‘while in their policy documents, NGOs reiterate that beneficiary voices have to be heard, there is still reluctance and nervousness about how best to achieve this most effectively’ (p. 40). While in other associative contexts self-representation has been achieved, for example, through videos made by migrants, ⁴ in NGOs’ audio-visual communication the testimony – in the form of live interviews or animated representations with voice-over – has been the main tool of self-expression, even if it is again a mediation and not a direct appropriation of the medium as such.

The functions of animation

By selecting some emblematic example of NGOs’ animated videos about refugee crisis, and by crossing discourse and visual analysis, this chapter will introduce all the main possibilities offered by the use of animation in humanitarian audio-visual communication.

SOS Méditerrannée is an NGO that was founded in 2016 to fill the absence of a European sea rescue programme and of a real political intention to put an end to the deadly shipwrecks of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach European shores. Born, therefore, in open opposition to government policies, SOS bases its communication mainly on its civil and activist nature, encouraged by private donations. First with the Aquarius boat, then with the Ocean Viking, this NGO has been very active in recent years, despite explicit government bans, and its constant rescues of shipwrecked people earned it the 2017 Unesco Houpouet-Boigny Peace Prize. Regarding its online audio-visual communication, if one looks at its YouTube channel, SOS limits itself to publishing an average of two or three videos per month, among which are rescue videos (filmed live and edited afterwards), as well as interviews that give voice to NGO members, survivors or experts/partners. Almost all of their publications are grouped into different categories according to the theme: ‘They support us’, ‘They talk about us’, ‘3 questions to’, ‘Testimony’, ‘Press point’. In order to show the communicative strategies of the use of animation, which constitutes a marginal part of their YouTube posts (15 animated videos on a total of 310), I will first compare two SOS videos that have the same function – to present the organisation and its call for support – and the same duration – 2 minutes – but two different audio-visual languages: the first one is a live action video while the second one is an animation video.

The first video, in live action, was published on YouTube on June 2021, and has received (as of today) 5367 views and 9 comments. In terms of sound, the video has no voice-over, but only diegetic noises belonging to the filmed images, and background music that moves from a phase of initial tension to a phase of hope. At the textual level, few titles punctuate the discursive progression of the video. The text begins with the exposition of the tragic facts – ‘Every year, thousands of people die at sea while trying to cross the Mediterranean’ –, and the presentation of the organisation – ‘In the wake of public indignation, SOS Méditerranée was created to provide assistance’. Then, it continues with its missions – ‘Save’, ‘Protect’, ‘Bear witness’ – to end with the call for support – ‘We are a European civil association, present in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland. Join us’. Already in the text, the video displays a well-established visual identity as the dominant colours are those chosen to represent the organisation: red – the colour of emergency (SOS) and care (rescues arrive like ambulances) – and white – the colour of peace (the hope of life after the rescue). The meaning of the textual part is accompanied by an explanatory montage of videos filmed by the organisation. At the beginning, the nocturnal images of the migrants’ makeshift boat in the middle of the sea introduce the context and the problem. Then the video segues into all the actions of SOS concerning the rescue at sea by their rescue boat (‘Rescue’), the care given to the survivors on board – giving water and food, allowing them to wash, to find some safety and comfort – (‘Protect’), and actions of restitution of the experience such as conferences, public meetings, photos, concerts and classes (‘Testify’). At the end, the call for support is emphasised by even more directly empathetic images, showing the faces of two young migrant girls barely smiling, hopeful, sitting among the other survivors on the edge of the Ocean Viking boat. This video then summarises important characteristics of live action humanitarian audio-visual communication, such as the aesthetics of reportage to show the actions of the NGO and the empathetic and emotional focus on the physical expressiveness of the beneficiaries (often women and children). We can thus confirm that, on this front, the communicative model has not really changed from the strategies we have outlined before, in relation to a certain paternalism and voyeurism of the suffering and vulnerability of the Other, even if obviously counterbalanced by the hope offered by the NGO’s aid.

The corresponding video of the presentation of SOS in animated form is, on the other hand, divided into two short videos of 1 minute each, the first (the one we are going to analyse), ‘Who we are’, devoted to the missions, and the second, ‘Join us’, to the call for support. In the description, the artistic and technical contribution is displayed through the names of those who worked on the video (directing, drawing, animation, voice, sound, editing) and the links to their specific websites. The technique chosen is the most frequent among the videos in our corpus: a traditional 2D animation, digitalised but very ‘sketchfull’, deliberately imperfect and imprecise, without details or background, uncluttered, minimalist, with figures reduced to few non-straight lines and a very synthetic and partial colouring, once again limited to the colours of the NGO’s visual identity (red, white and, this time, blue, to indicate the marine element). The childish style of the drawing is matched by the sound elements: the voice-over, which this time is omnipresent, functioning as a fairy tale-like narrator throughout the video; and a simple and light piano music. This fairy tale style implies a broad address and a positive, moral and constructive tone typical of children’s stories and animation’s tradition.

It is important to understand from the outset the main characteristic of the language of animation in this type of audio-visual communication, especially in the category of educational videos: the illustrative dimension. Instead of trying to create an explanatory and deepening link between the filmed images and the text, or basing its descriptive and empathetic function on the reportage style and the facial expressions of the portrait, as is the case with live action, the choice of animation makes it possible to illustrate, almost word by word, the exposition of the voice-over. Animation, in its true sense of giving movement and life, seeks a visual correspondence with the text, thanks to the light and creative brilliance of its aesthetics, in order not only to facilitate the comprehension of the meaning, but also to prolong the latter – as we will see immediately – through the other qualities of animation: the metaphorical, the metamorphic and the metonymic dimension (what we could call the 3Ms of animation language). The video begins with a voice over – ‘It’s the story of a captain, a European ship and committed citizens’ – illustrated by three shots: (1) the captain (recognisable by the striped t-shirt typically associated with sailors), (2) the SOS Méditerranée boat in the middle of the sea, (3) a group of citizens of all ages (among them a child with the European flag) who make a greeting gesture towards the boat. Every word has been illustrated, even the adjectives. Then the voiceover continues – ‘True to the principles of solidarity of the people of the sea, they create SOS Méditerranée’ –, and the animation shows a shipwrecked man drowning in the sea and a shot of the SOS boat underway, ready for rescue. ‘Thanks to donations from the general public, they are chartering a boat to save boats in distress’: on the screen we see the image of the European flag (the NGO is present in several European countries) whose circle of stars is transformed into a lifebuoy, launched into the sea to save the man who was drowning before. We can therefore observe how this animated illustration is metonymic – the shipwrecked man represent all the boats in distress; the European flag represent the donors –, metamorphic – the flag becomes a lifebuoy – and metaphorical – ordinary people, supporting the NGO, can help those in need.

The continuation of the video informs us more about the possibilities of animated representation of migrants. Following the strategy of ‘mitigating difference’, the author reduces the visual markers of diversity. The image of the refugee family (presented as ‘fleeing castaways’) appears to be neutralised and anonymised: the mother has straight, short and light hair, the children figures are too simplified to have any connotation and the man has just a moustache as a distinguishing feature. Only their luggage signifies their migrant status. Their presentation is followed by the push-factors, mentioned by the voice-over (dictatorships, wars, poverty, climate change) and illustrated once again thanks to the metonymic, metaphorical and metamorphic qualities of the animation: the dictatorship is represented, for example, by a giant man who crushes the family of migrants we have just seen. This shot also demonstrates another characteristic of animation: humour. Indeed, even in a tragic setting (dictatorial oppression), animation brings a light, creative and humoristic touch: this giant man, in military costume, with an excessively boastful and ruthless smile, despite his terrible action, retains a rather amusing aspect because of his caricatured and essentialist representation deriving from the classic iconography of dictators of the last century.

The video then moves on to the important moment for any NGO: the call for support. ‘We need you, because they need us’: this logical shift in the text is illustrated by a sequence of two shots. The first is a frontal shot of the captain at the beginning pointing his finger at the camera and thus at the viewer, as a sign of direct appeal (like the iconic enlistment gesture of the ‘I Want You’ poster used by the United States during the First World War). The second shot shows the drowning man with a moustache being saved by a lifebuoy and an arm coming from above: an image that symbolises the need of the shipwrecked and the need for help from a We (the rescuers) who, as a deus-ex-machina, comes from the sky, thanks to donations, to accomplish the rescue.

The following shot expresses another important quality of animation, very useful in educational videos: the synthetic dimension. ‘A boat in a rescue operation costs 14,000 euros a day: fuel, equipment, care, meals, repairs, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week’, explains the voice-over. The animation intervenes by synthesising all these elements in a single shot: the graphic capacity of the animation, with its unlimited possibility of manipulation, orders each object through a layout where everything finds its place, the SOS boat in the centre connects with lines the life jacket at the bottom left, a medical box at the top right, the fuel box at the right, a plate as a metonymy of the meal at the top left.

The next shot takes us back into the metaphor, but more poetically, reminding us that animation also allows for surreal flights of fancy. ‘There is no season for departure’: if the text has previously invoked a very human urgency to move due to the context and the push-factors, this new shot is constituted by an image that, on the contrary, sends us back to the natural dimension of any migration, with the image of a group of birds migrating over a man on a rock and then over the migrants’ boats. However, this shot undoubtedly has a connotative risk, as the association of migrants and birds is very delicate in an anti-racist discourse. Racism has often fed on the trope of the ‘naturalisation’ of the Other, that is, the connection of the racialised individual to nature, to an element that therefore precedes culture and the (Western) development of civilisation. Thus, this shot takes up the natural metaphors commonly used to describe migration – such as the terms ‘waves’ or ‘flows’ – which bring the migration phenomenon closer to an event emanating from the natural order, from the inevitable, while shading the specific contextual responsibilities and reasons, as well as the heterogeneous dynamics behind each migrant individual.

The video continues, in a more or less chronological order – push-factors, departure, shipwreck, rescue – with the image of tragedy: the boat collapses into the water and a set of figures, representing the shipwrecked migrants, drown in the abyss. This shot shows us another characteristic of animation: the power to represent the unrepresentable. Death, shipwreck, accident, disaster – everything that is not usually represented by live-action images for practical reasons (it is almost impossible to be in front of this event with a camera) and moral reasons (it would be amoral to film this anyway, let alone show it) – can be shown head-on by animation. At the end, however, the animation returns to the metaphorical sense with another delicate image. ‘Together let’s save them. Join us. Give. Share’, encourages the voice-over, to actively engage the viewer in a collective We (‘let’s save them’) and in a sense of empowerment (‘give’, ‘share’). The final animated image that illustrates this humanitarian action is that of an arm, once again, coming from above the frame and giving a huge European coin to the drowning man’s arm; the coin, circular, becomes a lifebuoy, which is finally held by both arms, symbolising this new union. At the bottom of the frame, the two icons to be clicked for the actions of ‘donate’ and ‘share’ appear, and then the practical information with the link to the website and the social networks. What is interesting about the use of animation in humanitarian communication is the fact that even if the discourse is, at the same level as the live-action videos, frontally paternalistic, rescuer and victimising, and, even more so than the live-action images, visibly simplistic in its representation of solidarity aid, the final overall result is, on the contrary, more discreet, innovative and less stigmatising. The reasons are to be found in its relatively recent exploitation, which makes it still a fresh and alternative medium, and, above all, in its transformative and non-indexical quality, which distances its representations from the ghosts of reality and its traditional visual repertoire of images with colonial, exotic and essentialist connotations. A live action close-up shot of a migrant in distress in a lifeboat, against the backdrop of a Western aid speech, thus seems to us to be more misery-celebrating than an animated shot of a migrant receiving European currency from an arm that comes from above, which in itself (without animation) would seem to us to be much more extreme and explicit in its paternalistic and subordinate scheme.

In other SOS Méditerranée animated educational videos, the activist bias is even more accentuated, for example in the #RespectLawoftheSea campaign video, which uses an animation aesthetic with more details and elements, a filling of the whole frame, and therefore more ‘fullness’. The explicit and frontal accusation about the ‘illegality’ of non-rescue at sea on the part of European governments, recalled by the refrain ‘Respect the Law’, not only sounds like a strong and clear injunction, but also reverses the process of criminalisation: the real criminals are not the migrants who try to cross the sea, but the politicians who don’t help them in case of shipwreck. This confirms that NGOs are trying to contrast the phenomena of ‘symbolic bordering’, ‘strategic silence’ and ‘circulation of fears’ discussed in the first part, by focussing on ‘policy making’. After explaining with figures and historical information the lack of respect for the United Nations Convention on Rescue at Sea, the use of animation allows the NGO to end the solidarity appeal with an imaginary scene that is utopian this time. In a shot that follows a shipwreck scene, two European parliamentarians are shown in their act of reparation: they break the glass of a box, they take a lifebuoy and they throw it into the sea towards a boat of migrants. Simple and direct, the animation brings to life a different scenario, a possibility of change which, even if apparently utopian for the moment, encourages, with its visual representation, the spectators to believe in it and thus to participate in the solidarity campaign. This image seems to answer the question raised by Chouliaraki and Stolic (2017: 1163): ‘Is this ultimately a “refugee crisis” or a crisis of responsibility itself?’. Could the dissemination of these videos indeed contribute to a missing accountability?

In an animated video devoted to ‘case management’ and produced by the NGO PICUM, which works on the more legal aspects (labour law, documentation, violence) of migration, we can notice, on the other hand, the more informative, infographic and macronarrative dimension of the educational video. We only have to look at the beginning of the video. While the voice-over introduces one of the NGO’s missions – ‘Managing migration can be both humane and well organised. Case management is a way to do this’ – we see on the screen a sheet of paper coming out of a folder (‘managing’) with stickers with a little heart (‘humane’) and a little smile (‘well organised’). Then the text ‘Case management’ is accompanied by two circular vignettes, one with two hands (one white and one coloured) shaking, the other with a ticked box (‘is a way to do this’). Each informative and persuasive word of the voice-over is thus illustrated in a very synthetic and iconographic way, in a fragmentation, accumulation, stratification and progression typical of the graphic style of digital visual presentations used to accompany an oral exhibition. Rather than plans, one could speak in this case of slides of a slide show, with the animated visual evolution of the elements that each page contains. This more neutral informational dimension may give rise to a ‘numeric dehumanisation’ in educational videos, but it is understood that this is due to an attempt to stifle the argument and not to dehumanise the migrants.

Concerning the second – smaller – category of animated videos belonging to the audiovisual communication of NGOs, the storytelling videos, based on migrants’ testimonies, everything we have said about the properties of animation obviously remains valid. On the other hand, there is a major freedom in the choice of techniques, aesthetics and staging, which is due to the micro-narrative format of the testimony: the storytelling does not need to provide a large amount of general information (implying the use of graphics, icons, texts), but it must rather exalt the emotional impact of the personal story. The representation of a migrant’s individual story, which is sometimes linked to a specific campaign and other times to a simple but decisive desire to integrate the voice of the beneficiaries into its communication (as we have seen in the theoretical section), can take on different forms.

In the animated series launched by SOS Méditerranée under the name ‘Jeunesse naufragée’, in nine episodes of 1 minute each, the testimonies of migrants who survived the shipwreck are read by voice-overs interpreted by other migrants. Visually, the animation is composed by a collage and a superposition of drawn elements (the moon, the sun, the boat, eyes, a boy) and real photos, with a watercolour colouring. The refined style of this animation, which favours images of the sky and the sea, the migrants reduced to eyes immersed in the blue of the night, contrasts with the violent story of an accident that occurred on the boat during the witness’ crossing. The result is an intimate, personal and original rendition of a story that might otherwise go unobserved among the thousands present in these years of traumatic crossings. Another technique used is called children’s drawing animation: the video ‘End of Nightmares’, which can be found on the YouTube channel of the NGO Norwegian Refugee Council, raises awareness of the psychological trauma left by the war among refugee children and uses a series of drawings made by a Palestinian child to represent this type of testimony. The childlike aesthetics of the drawings – few lines, vivid and unrealistic colours, stylisation of figures, out-of-proportion objects – further accentuate the horror of the war visions: through the child’s internal point of view (during a nightmare), a subjective tracking shot immerses us in the hell of a street where we see a succession of tanks, soldiers, bombings, fires, corpses and ambulances, in a progressive chaos until the child awakes. Animation, thanks to its metamorphic and surreal dimension, makes it possible to better embody the violent emotions, traumas and nightmares of the migrant subject, even more so when the child’s internal point of view is represented. Another example is the ‘Unfairy Tales’ series, launched by UNICEF to capture real stories that ‘were not meant to be for children’. ‘Malak and the boat’, a 2-minute video released for this series 6 years ago, tells the story of a Syrian child’s journey to escape war: this time the animation chooses 3D to further exalt the gruesome metamorphoses of the sea, with the gigantic waves transforming into a monstrous octopus that envelops the migrant girl’s boat. In a testimonial story where subjective emotions dominate over objective facts, the possibility of animation to represent the events as the subject experienced them proves to be very effective. In storytelling videos, there is certainly a ‘de-politicised sentimentality’ with heart-breaking stories that propose a victimisation of the beneficiary, but, thanks to the internal point of view, we notice that the focus shifts from emergency paternalism to the direct knowledge of other people’s experience.

Another useful element in the animated representation of a migrant’s testimony is the cartography, which helps to better visualise the migration routes present in the stories. In the video ‘Samira’s Story’, produced by the UN Network on Migration, the testimony of Samira, an Ivory Coast girl migrating to Europe, is represented primarily by the cohabitation in the same frame of the subject – a silhouette of her face in profile talking – and her experience – a succession of animated maps indicating her journey. This composition, again because of the visual layering of the animation, confronts the viewer directly with the main issue of the video: an individual (her head) narrating his journey (her displacements). Other possible animation techniques present in the corpus complete the variations offered by this language in the representation of testimonies useful to the awareness of solidarity and therefore to the support of humanitarian missions. In the ‘Feel At Home Project’ campaign, launched by the NGO Migrant Voice in Glasgow, there is, for example, a video that adopts the stop-motion technique to show the drawings that were made on a board to illustrate the responses of individuals – migrants present in Glasgow and other inhabitants of the city – to the question ‘What does it feel like to be home?’. In IOM’s video ‘Disappeared Migrant Families: Listen to their stories’, the testimonies are represented instead by the visualisation of sound waves, which discreetly accompany the narrative voice-over and corresponding text, in order to let the viewer focus on the audio.

Conclusion

Through its plurality of techniques that drawn attention to the artificiality and the construction of the image, and its possibility of manipulating and visualising big amounts of data, animation becomes a perfect tool for educational and communicational use. Everything is controlled by the intention of the author, driving the communication by precisely and functionally pointing out elements of description, explanation and symbolisation, while offering more resistance to the porosity of reality than the indexical image (which is inevitably tied with mimesis and realism). The persuasive discourse of the communicational video is effectively and harmonically illustrated by animated images that can simplify in few steps many large and complex questions, giving the impression of being omnicomprehensive. As Herhuth (2016) wrote, the constructed movement of animation is perfectly compatible with the search of truth: the old philosophical divide between fabrication/artificiality and ‘truth’ is overpassed by modern western philosophy, which affirms that the ‘truth’ is mediated by creativity, technology, and transformative thought (p. 10). Moreover, Wells (1998) believes that animation’s distance with physical reality allows it to be much more concerned with the metaphysical, and with the meaning we attribute to our experience of reality (p. 11). Many humanitarian animated videos attempt to define ‘who’ is a migrant, trying to provide new approaches to this over-mediatised topic, by the illustration of information, stories and possible actions. This article has thus demonstrated how all these characteristics make animation a particularly suitable language for humanitarian communication, whose function is to enhance crisis management – the objective, effective, data manipulation and visualisation of the educational videos – and solidarity engagement – the subjective, expressive and empathetic treatment of storytelling videos.

Our comparison between live action and animated videos has shown a relevant distinction about their respective functions and uses in solidarity communication. On one hand, live action videos exploit the documentary-reportage dimension and the empathetic visual power of showing the actual people involved, their physicality (close-ups of beneficiaries’ faces, looks and expressions are common), and their interaction and concrete encounters and care in the field as a visual evidence of NGO’s rescue operations and missions. Live action images of the reality of the context – overcrowded boats, destroyed cities, poor villages, overburdened hospitals, arid landscapes – can also reinforce the spectator’s perception of the need for aid and NGO intervention. This need is sometimes explained by a ‘sponsor’, a famous celebrity whose physical presence in the video can have an impact on the persuasion of the potential donor. Moreover, the economical factor plays a role in the visibly larger production of live action communication, since these videos are generally cheaper than animated ones and can be made quickly either through new footage filmed in situ by the NGO’s cameramen or through the editing of existing visual archives.

On the other hand, animation, which is still very limited in number (animated videos require more time and money for their preparation, especially given the need to mobilise the specific skills of their creators and technicians), is proposed as an occasional complement in NGOs’ communication strategies. Its advantages, as analysed in this article, are essentially based on the application of its abstract formalistic nature on the documentary content, a representational force that can overpass the limits of live action images. We observed how animation has a unique illustrative power, because of its capacity to visualise, synthetise and connect any element from the most concrete ones (people, objects, actions), until the most abstract (numeric and graphic data and statistics), emotional (nightmares, traumas, dreams) and traditionally unrepresentable ones (shipwrecks, deaths). The animated use of these elements can serve to metonymic, metaphorical and metamorphic effects (what we called the ‘3Ms of animation’) that can help to represent solidarity actions and objectives: in the example of SOS Méditerranée described above, an arm (metonymy of the donor) gives a coin (metaphor of aid) which is transformed into a lifebuoy (metamorphosis). Opposite to live action frames, mainly tied to the existing characteristics of the referent, animation has an indefinite possibility of strategically organising and optimising the cohabitation of elements in the same shot (human figures, icons, texts, maps, diagrams) and by doing so constructing a new meaning through visual composition. This aesthetic stratification can also be accompanied by a discursive stratification (the real coexists with the unreal, the tragic tone with the humorous) that often play with the borders of narrative genres and styles. Moreover, it is important to stress that, because of its historical development and traditional uses, animation retains aspects linked to the language of childhood, including its lightness, humour, caricatures, tenderness, clean lines, accessibility, fantastical flights of fancy and its ease in assuming a tone of moral rhyme, typical of stories for children.

All these characteristics turn animation into a powerful alternative to live action communication, offering a fresh and uncommon view on a highly mediatised, politicised and polarising theme such as the refugee crisis. Its universal, flexible, childlike and clear visual metaphors perfectly match solidarity world’s goals, which are built on the transmission of universal and metaphorical concepts (cooperation, union, sharing, cohabitation, diversity, peace, respect, equality, etc.). If an image of a group of people holding hands in a circle (to represent unity and cooperation) is absolutely acceptable in an animated video, the same image would be perceived as overly clichéd, facile and absurd in a live action video. The innocence of the animated figures, as well as the care implicit in the animation process, which retains an artisanal aspect even in its digital transformation, nourishes the empathy necessary for the solidarity message of the videos. This is the case even when the types of representations constructed by the animation keep, as we have seen, some of the classical tropes of otherisation, such as essentialisation, naturalisation, miserabilism, childishness and generally follow the trend of ‘positive imagery’ and ‘new emotionality’.

In conclusion, this article suggests that, following this solid basis – and probably cancelling these last traces of stereotypes soon –, the use of animation could grow in the next years in order to become a major and persuasive tool for humanitarian communication (and not only). In a society that is quickly accumulating larger datas while improving its empathic and inclusive representations, the above-mentioned characteristics of animation, both objective and subjective, graphic and creative, clear and universal, could be a wide solution for media, institutions, corporations and creators to deal with intercultural and global issues.