Abstract
This article explores animated segments that appear in otherwise live action, mainstream commercial documentaries made since 2000. An examination of films including The Age of Stupid, Bowling for Columbine, Searching for Sugar Man, Camp 14: Total Control Zone, Cobain: Montage of Heck and Everything’s Cool suggests that animated sequences function either as ‘connective tissue’ or ‘disruptive interjection’ and that this function is not necessarily determined by the animation being aesthetically or ontologically distinct from the live action context in which it appears. Instead, other narrative and rhetorical devices determine to what extent an animated section interjects. Ultimately, the author suggests that the ability to interject into the realist veneer of documentary representation demonstrates animation’s critical and political potential within a non-fiction context.
Keywords
About six minutes into the critically and commercially acclaimed documentary Searching for Sugar Man (dir. Malik Bendjelloul, 2012) a sequence occurs that becomes beguilingly opaque in terms of the nature and materiality of the images. The sequence begins in a straightforward enough way, with a hand-drawn picture of the outside of a bar called ‘the Sewer’. Slowly, the pencil lines of the drawing are filled out and then dissolve to a photorealistic animated image of the same scene. We start tracking to the left down the street and the bar gives way to another storefront as the tracking ‘camera’ catches up with Rodriguez, the musician subject of the documentary, walking down the street from right to left with his guitar slung over his back as snow lightly falls around him. The camera, which is moving more quickly than Rodriguez, tracks past him and the animated image dissolves to a live action shot from an identical tracking point of view, albeit several decades later in the present (see Figure 1).
The seamless segue from digital, photorealistic animation to live action footage in Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012) can be seen in this shot. As the ‘camera’ tracks from right to left, the animation (on the left) dissolves almost invisibly to live action (on the right). Screenshot from DVD of Searching for Sugar Man (Studiocanal).
The dissolve from animation to live action is almost invisible, in part because the digital animated imagery is remarkably photorealistic, so much so that one only realizes the image is animated when it dissolves to its live action counterpart halfway through this tracking shot. As such, this sequence works to establish parity between its two types of imagery (live action film and animation). The documentary’s director described the animation in Searching for Sugar Man as ‘sort of the film’s connective tissue’ that is used to ‘stand in for actual imagery of Rodriguez’ for events that took place prior to any of the extant filmed footage of the musician and, therefore, to fill in gaps left by this absence of archival footage (Searching for Sugar Man, nd). The animation works as ‘connective tissue’ by virtue of being almost aesthetically indistinguishable from the live action material so that it works to join into a cohesive whole. This invisibility of digital animation is a teleology that is familiar from commercial, primarily big-budget Hollywood cinema. Here, digital imagery, more often than not in the form of visual effects, tends to be understood as striving to look the same as photographic images. As the digital becomes increasingly photorealistic, the argument goes, it becomes increasingly aesthetically indeterminate from the photographic context in which it is placed. However, there are also examples of recent live action documentaries, which will be discussed below, in which animated sequences are not so seamlessly intertwined. Instead, the animation works to interrupt or interject into the live action proceedings. Here the digital animation strives not for photorealism, but to emulate the graphic styles and techniques of analogue animation.
There is a long tradition, one that precedes digital animation, of including short animated segments in live action documentary film. Historically, snippets of animation have appeared in live action documentaries to explain and clarify, most commonly in the form of animated diagrams and maps. For example, the animated maps, moving illustrations of military equipment and diagrams created by the Disney studio for Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series of seven propaganda films, made between 1942 and 1945, helped explain military strategy and motivation to potentially unwilling, or at least uninformed, US armed forces personnel prior to their deployment during the Second World War. This use of animation demonstrates that envisioned information is easier to understand and retain, and that much factual information is communicated more efficiently via animation than the spoken word. It is easier to explain, for example, the significance of the encroachment of the German army across Europe visually than in words. The animation in Why We Fight often also conveys more than facts by being used for emphasis and visual association. Simple symbolism prevails throughout the series, such as pitting dark hues for enemy nations against paler colours for the Allies. This is established right at the outset in the series’ first animated sequence in Prelude to War when a dark, black inky stain spreads across Japan, Italy and Germany as the narrator notes the cultural differences between those countries and the USA. In this instance, the animated maps in the Why We Fight films serve a purpose beyond merely marking out geographical boundaries – they are also helping to deliver the nationalist, propagandistic message of the series (Honess Roe, 2013: 8–9).
Animation is still used in live action documentaries to explain, clarify and illustrate. In an article on the use of digital animation in primetime television documentary, Craig Hight (2008: 19) calls this use of animation the ‘symbolic expositional mode’ and points out that ‘such forms of graphic exposition draw their legitimacy from how they are used in wider sequences’. More recently, Cristina Formenti (2015) has classed this type of animation as ‘sober’ because it is both ‘dry’ and ‘expository’, with its reliance on ‘the graphic language of technical drawing’. This type of instructive, diagrammatic animation-within-documentary is still very common. Perhaps the best-known recent example of this use of animation in mainstream theatrical documentary is An Inconvenient Truth (2006), but there are myriad others and it is a very familiar technique in television programming from science documentaries to the news.
Animated segments within documentary have, therefore, historical antecedents. They did not suddenly appear with the advent of digital cinema. However, it is undeniable that since around 2000, as digital animation has become increasingly ubiquitous, 1 so too has the appearance of animated sequences in otherwise live action documentaries. 2 These digital animated segments are more varied, and complex, than the instructive and illustrative graphic animation that has been seen since before the advent of digital animation that draws on ‘well-established traditions of information design’ (Hight, 2008: 14). There is undoubtedly an economic basis for this minor proliferation in the number and variety of animated segments: as animation tools and technologies become increasingly affordable and accessible, it becomes increasingly practicable to use them in documentaries, which inevitably have smaller budgets than their mainstream, commercial fiction counterparts. Many animated sequences seen in contemporary documentaries would simply not have been possible prior to the advent of digital animation technology because they would have taken too much time, and therefore too much money, to produce. The ‘connective’, almost incidental, animation that appears in Searching for Sugar Man appears by virtue of the fact that digital animation has become a practical way to, in this instance, overcome the absence of archival material needed in the documentary.
In this article, I will explore the different types of animated segments that are seen in post-2000 live action mainstream documentary. 3 Looking beyond the more familiar ‘graphic expositional mode’ already explored by Hight (2008), I will suggest that in this period we see animated segments that function in a different way to the illustrative or instructive animation seen in pre-digital documentaries such as the Why We Fight series. Instead of relying on established modes of information design, they utilize digital animation in both subtler and more overt ways. In turn, I will suggest that these segments require a nuanced reading of the ontology of digital animation and its relationship to live action documentary. Furthermore, that the way these segments are woven, or not, into their live action contexts is indicative of the critical and political potential of digital animation within a documentary context.
The aesthetics and rhetoric of animated interjections
Gwen Haworth’s (2007) documentary about her male-to-female gender transition is an autobiographical documentary that comprises mostly interviews with family members and close friends, interspersed with home video and observational material. The film also includes some less conventional documentary material in the form of a few short animated segments. About 30 minutes into the documentary, an interview with Gwen’s mother is interrupted by an animated sequence that playfully establishes the issues she has with Gwen’s take on being female. Captions are added to retro magazine images of women and domestic scenes, such as ‘family events are not optional’ and ‘grow your hair long’. Haworth (2008) has commented that she included the animation to lighten the mood and to add humour to a film that would otherwise become too intense and serious. However, this segment is more than a comic interlude. We might think of the use of animation in She’s a Boy I Knew as an interjection. In spoken language, an interjection is a word such as ‘wow’ or ‘aha’ that one utters to create emphasis, draw attention to what has just been, or is about to be, said and to express emotion and attitude. Grammatically, an interjection is not related to the other part of a sentence, yet it only really gains meaning, or significance, when heard in conjunction with that sentence. If a speaker says ‘Wow!’ and nothing else, the listener will most likely wonder ‘What?’ If the same speaker says: ‘Wow! That’s the best documentary I’ve ever seen!’ then the listener will better understand why they said ‘Wow’ and the value judgement being made regarding the documentary in question will gain greater emphasis. So, while the ‘How to be a girl’ section in She’s a Boy I Knew can be viewed independently of the documentary in which it appears and as such could stand as an exclamatory statement on its own, it only fully resonates as an articulation of the film’s themes about the societal expectations around gender when viewed within the documentary as a whole.
Perhaps one of the best-known examples of an animated segment that interjects in a live action documentary is in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002). The animated ‘A Brief History of the United States of America’ sequence comes about 50 minutes into the film and takes place after a section in which Michael Moore questions why the US has a higher number of gun-related deaths than other countries such as the UK, France, Germany and Canada. He rejects various suggestions such as violent video games (these originate in Japan, he claims), violent histories (he suggests the UK, France and Germany have more violent pasts than the US) and levels of poverty (Moore claims Canada has higher unemployment levels). Moore constructs this part of the film’s argument by intercutting archival and original material from various sources (for example, historical footage of marching Nazi soldiers, footage of rough sleepers in the US and Canada) with voiceover narration to the background of elegiac classical music. Next Michael Moore interviews Tom Mauser, father of one of the Columbine shooting victims, and they puzzle over why gun rampages happen in the US.
The film then cuts abruptly to the animated segment, which traces the history of America from the arrival of the pilgrims, emphasizing the tendency to persecute, fight and kill perceived threats to their safety, including Native Americans and ‘witches’. The 3-minute sequence sprints through the consecration of the right to bear arms in the form of the Second Amendment, slavery, the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and the NRA to the civil rights movement and subsequent white flight to suburban communities. This animated sequence stands out from the rest of the film in several ways. Aesthetically, it is markedly different to anything that comes before or after it. The animation owes much to South Park in terms of its look, sound and attitude. 4 It has a ‘cartoony’ quality that comes from its bright colour palette and the way the characters are caricatured by, for example, emphasizing certain facial features and making their heads the same size as the rest of their body. The tone of caricature and satirical critique is emphasized by the voiceover narration, which is delivered in an exaggerated unrefined Southern accent, and the medley of background music. This includes several well-known pieces of classical music such as a jaunty instrumental version of the American patriotic song ‘Yankee Doodle’, which accompanies the history of slavery section, and the driving finale to Edward Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from Peer Gynt, which is heard as the animated segment reaches its inevitable conclusion of a country segregated by fear. The frequent changes in score contribute to the sequence’s brisk visual pacing and the wry contrast between sound and image amplifies the sardonic quality of its humour. ‘Narrated’ by an energetic, chirpy on-screen talking bullet (see Figure 2), the sequence makes a mockery of the perceived threat of ‘the Other’, as trigger-happy pilgrims shoot down welcoming Native Americans at first sight and white men’s teeth chatter with fear at the imagined prospect of freed slaves taking revenge.
The idiosyncratically upbeat narrator of ‘A Brief History of the United States of America’ in Michael Moore’s (2002) documentary Bowling for Columbine takes the form, ironically, of gun ammunition. Screenshot from DVD of Bowling for Columbine (Momentum Pictures).
The animated sequence in Bowling for Columbine interjects into the live action documentary in part because of its aesthetic distinction: its graphic style looks different from the rest of the film’s on-the-fly and archival filmed footage. Jonathan Hodgson’s 2-minute-long ‘War for Resources’ animated segment from The Age of Stupid (Franny Armstrong, 2009) is also aesthetically disparate from the documentary in which it appears. The film segues to the animation via actor Pete Postlethwaite, who plays an archivist from the future. Postlethwaite is used as a device to knit the various elements of the documentary together and acts as a kind of on-screen director or editor by ‘selecting’ via high-tech computer interface the film’s various elements, much of it original documentary footage from various geographic locations that have already been impacted by climate change. As Postlethwaite drags and clicks on an element on his screen (our POV of this is from below, so Postlethwaite and the audience are viewing the interface from opposite sides), we see a thumbnail image of the beginning of the animated sequence. This then cuts and the animation becomes full screen. The camera tracks across the spines of a line of books: ‘War for Allah’, ‘War for Democracy’ and so on. When we get to the ‘War for Resources’, the book pulls out, opens up and the images inside are animated as the sequence takes us on a jaunt through the pages of history from Prehistory to the Iraq War.
The sequence owes much in terms of its attitude to the ‘History of America’ sequence in Bowling for Columbine, although it is perhaps more pointed and less sardonic in tone. 5 In addition, the ‘War for Resources’ animation is of a very different style to the animation in Michael Moore’s earlier documentary. Instead of the cartoony aesthetic of Bowling for Columbine’s animation, Hodgson took inspiration from historical imagery and the basis for the look of the sequence was illustrations from a 19th-century book about the religions of the world. As the animated history book opens, the narrator tells us ‘Human history is littered with the corpses of people with stuff worth stealing.’ The narrator goes on to dispassionately list various resources that have been fought over (from ‘animals’ to ‘shiny things’ to ‘people’) as the sequence proceeds to temporally and spatially conflate broad historical events in a way that often gains meaning as much from the animated transitions and juxtaposition as their individual occurrence. For example, the ‘spices’ section trenchantly draws a connection between everyday luxuries and exploitation when it transitions from heads being chopped off and skewered on stakes in an unlabelled colonial territory to two society ladies enjoying tea and cake in, the setting and their accents suggest, the metropole. The camera pulls out from the scene of traders walking in front of the skewered heads carrying baskets of nutmeg to reveal this as an image in a book being held by one of the ladies (see Figure 3). As she takes a bite of cake with the exclamation, ‘mmm, nutmeg slice!’, her hostess asks, ‘tea?’ The camera zooms in on the surface of her tea on which three boats appear, one of which has ‘CHINA TEA’ emblazoned on its sail; this morphs to a scene of naval warfare.
The political and economic implications of their afternoon cup of tea and slice of cake are lost on two society ladies in Jonathan Hodgson’s animated segment ‘War for Resources’ in Age of Stupid (Franny Armstrong, 2009). Screenshot from downloadable HD animated segment, available at: https://vimeo.com/42968941
The sequence is as humbling as it is devastating in the way it makes a connection between the history of colonization, consumerism and oil consumption. One of the points of the sequence: the tragic trajectory of civilization, is concisely conveyed by the conflation of two historically separate moments when many ships carrying slaves float across the ocean from right to left while a Live Aid boat sails from left to right in the background. The inevitability of the history told in this animated sequence is underscored by the accompanying music: the dynamic and triumphant closing minutes of the finale to the William Tell overture. As strings drive the melody forward and cymbals crash, we zoom in to Iraq on a world map on which are written the words ‘Loads of Oil’. As in Bowling for Columbine, ‘War for Resources’ creates an interruption in The Age of Stupid’s narrative and rhetorical flow. This ‘Wow!’ or ‘Hey!’ type of interjection transpires in part by virtue of the aesthetic and formal difference between the animation and the live action documentary into which it is inserted. As such, one might think that the animation in Searching for Sugar Man is connective by virtue of the blurring of the difference between digital animation and live action, whereas the animation in Bowling for Columbine and The Age of Stupid is a disruptive interjection because it emphasizes their ontological distinction.
Nuancing the digital of animation in live action documentary
That the digital animation in Searching for Sugar Man works as ‘connective tissue’ is relatively straightforward to reconcile with much of the discourse surrounding digital imagery and animation in a live action context, which emphasizes photorealism. In an article on the relationship between the ontology of the image and the viewer’s relationship with it, John Belton (2014) focuses on the aesthetic similarity between digital and analogue photographic images. When Belton suggests that film tends to elide the ontological difference between the digital and the analogue, he is echoing the sentiments of other prominent theorists on digital imagery and the ontology of film and media, including Lev Manovich and Philip Rosen. Belton acknowledges this when he says, ‘as Rosen and Manovich have suggested, digital images are essentially simulations of analogue photographic images’ (p. 243), and then later, ‘digital images are almost impossible to distinguish from analogue images’ (p. 243). This focus on the photorealistic capacity of digital animation tends to imply, overtly or not, the notion of a teleological march towards the indeterminacy of the digital and the analogue. As Lev Manovich (2001: 199) has observed, ‘the achievement of photorealism is the main goal of research in the field of computer graphics.’ This is the dominant view regarding the purpose and potential of digital animation and it means that discussions of the use of digital animation can often conflate the ‘digital’ with ‘photorealistic 3D computer animation’.
These discussions tend to focus on the use of digital photorealistic animation in the context of mainstream Hollywood cinema, where digital animation effects strive to be invisible so as not to disrupt the narrative cohesion of the film. However, this tendency can also be seen in discussion of mainstream documentary. In the specific context of primetime television documentary, Craig Hight (2008: 17) calls this type of digital animation the ‘graphic verité mode’ and notes that it is generally used for reconstructions in a way that replicates ‘familiar forms of documentary cinematography’. I have previously discussed at length the ways that certain animated documentaries such as Walking with Dinosaurs (BBC, 1999) work to aesthetically erase the ontological distinction between digital animation and live action material and have called this use of animation, in the context of animated documentaries, ‘mimetic substitution’ (see ch. 2, ‘Digital Realities’, in Honess Roe, 2013). Searching for Sugar Man uses animation in a similar way by taking advantage of advanced digital animation and post-production technology to ‘construct further layers of ontological complexity that are ultimately not designed to trouble the viewer’ (Hight, 2008: 28). As such, the use of digital imagery and animation in Searching for Sugar Man is consistent with the way such material is typically understood – as striving for resemblance to the photographic and, as a result, eliding ontological difference.
However, a consideration of the ontology of the animation in The Age of Stupid and Bowling for Columbine reminds us that that digital animation does not necessarily equate to photorealism. When I asked animator Jonathan Hodgson to what extent the animation in the ‘War for Resources’ sequence in The Age of Stupid was digital, he said ‘All digital … A bit of stop-motion … But, everything really’. Even though the sequence doesn’t look like ‘digital animation’ within the context of live action cinema in the way that one might expect (i.e. photorealistic) it was entirely dependent on digital and computer animation tools for its construction. In fact, the animation in both Bowling for Columbine and The Age of Stupid was created on a computer. To make ‘War for Resources’, Hodgson scanned the history book images and then created the animation using a variety of mostly digital animation tools and techniques including Flash and After Effects (Hodgson, 2017). 6 The animation for Bowling for Columbine was created using the widely available (and cheap) animation programme Flash.
In both films, however, the digital animation is working against its commonly accepted goal of photorealism, and instead as a tool to facilitate the faster and cheaper production of styles that were specific to the medium of animation prior to the advent of digital technology. In The Age of Stupid, Hodgson’s sequence has the look of analogue paper cut-out animation that would traditionally have been created by cutting a drawing of a character, for example, into many separate movable parts and incrementally moving each part before taking a single still shot. For Bowling for Columbine, Brooklyn-based animation company FlickerLab emulated South Park’s cheap and basic cut-out aesthetic in Flash animation. 7 The animation in both films could, arguably, have been produced using traditional, analogue animation methods – something that cannot be said of the photorealistic animation in Searching for Sugarman. However, as Hodgson (2017) pointed out to me regarding his ‘War for Resources’ sequence, this would have taken years, as opposed to months, to make and as such would never have been feasible within The Age of Stupid’s production schedule and budget.
So, we might then argue that what distinguishes connective and disruptive animation in live action documentary is what it looks like and the extent to which the ontological distinction between digital animation and live action is either elided or emphasized. In Searching for Sugar Man, the animation strives to look like live action so that it fits in more seamlessly. In The Age of Stupid and Bowling for Columbine the animation looks like traditional animation, so it stands out.
Strategies of connective animation
However, the examples that I will now go on to consider demonstrate that the connective characteristics of an animated segment are not dependent solely on the presence or lack of ontological elision via the aesthetic similarity between live action footage and photorealistic animation. Rather, there are frequent examples of the use of ‘connective’ animated sequences in live action documentaries that use other, subtle, strategies to establish the legitimacy of animation as a part of the fabric of the film’s narrative trajectory even though the animation is visually distinct from live action. Camp 14: Total Control Zone (dir. Marc Wiese, 2012) and the more recent Life, Animated (dir. Roger Ross Williams, 2016) include segments of computer-generated animation that emulate the style of older, analogue animation techniques. Both films set up their use and style of animation early on. This, in addition to the elements of sound design, which will be discussed below, works to make sure that the animation’s subsequent appearance does not disrupt the films’ narrative and aesthetic coherence, despite it being as aesthetically (and ontologically) disparate from its live action context as the animation in Bowling for Columbine and Age of Stupid.
Camp 14 is about a young man, Shin Dong-Huyk, who has defected from North Korea by escaping from the concentration camp in which he was born. It is mostly made up of interview material with Shin and others (including guards and other perpetrators) and observational footage of Shin as he goes about his new daily life in South Korea. Of course, there is no filmed footage of Shin’s time in the camp, so this part of the documentary is reconstructed using animation. The film includes numerous animated sequences, most of them around a minute in length, created by Ali Soozandeh. 8 The first short animated sequence occurs 4.5 minutes into the film, before the opening credits have finished. A subtle sound bridge of ambient noise accompanies the cut to an animated scene of people working in a coal mine. The animation has the look of a charcoal drawing. After less than a minute, in which time the animation has moved out of the coal mine to give an establishing shot of the camp with a line of shadowy mountains in the distance, we cut back to live action and a hand drawing in charcoal on paper. We then see Shin sitting with an artist who is drawing the camp according to Shin’s description. ‘What did the terrain behind the camp look like?’ asks the artist. ’There was a long mountain range’ says Shin. The scene continues as the artist fills out details on the paper. As the image becomes more detailed, it becomes clear that this is what formed the basis for the preceding animation. The drawing scene plays no narrative function in the documentary and is not one that is returned to. Its function is to assert the validity of the animation that follows and to suggest that it is a faithful reconstruction of the environment in which Shin grew up, even though it clearly looks animated.
Similar establishing techniques are used in Life, Animated. The documentary, about how classic Disney films provided a way for a family to communicate with their autistic son Owen, uses two different styles of original animation: sketchy black-and-white drawings that reconstruct parts of Owen’s back story and more fully realized and colourful animation of his fantasy world ‘The Land of the Lost Sidekicks’ (see Figure 4). The animated sequences copy the look of hand-drawn cel animation, but were created on the computer by French company Mac Guff. The film establishes the black-and-white line drawn animation as part of the film’s visual grammar in its opening credit sequence as drawn images of Owen and his family appear intercut with home movie footage from Owen’s childhood. This means that when the first animated sequences of Owen appear about 8 minutes into the film, such as the top image in Figure 4, their appearance is not abrupt or disruptive even though, as in Camp 14, these bear no resemblance to live action imagery (although they do bear recognisable resemblance to Owen, who appears in the live action sections of the documentary). Rather than interrupting the flow of the documentary narrative, they supplement it through offering visualizations of aspects of Owen’s childhood that were not captured on his parents’ camera. These brief animated snippets occur frequently in the film until about halfway through its running time when the longer, more involved and more fully animated ‘The Land of the Lost Sidekicks’ appears. The characterization of Owen remains the same in ‘The Land of the Lost Sidekicks’ sections, as can be seen in the two stills of Owen shown in Figure 4 comparing the film’s two styles of animation. This means that, even though it is animated in a different style and can be described as a ‘film within a film’ (Mitchell, 2016: 31), it too fits into the film’s narrative and aesthetic flow and, unlike the animated interjections in Bowling for Columbine and The Age of Stupid, ‘The Land of the Lost Sidekicks’ would make little sense if viewed independently of Life, Animated.
This composite of two shots from Life, Animated (dir. Roger Ross Williams, 2016) shows the two different styles of animation used in the film. The top is the more sketchy style used in the re-enactments, the bottom is the fuller style used in ‘The Land of the Lost Sidekicks’. Screenshot from DVD of Life, Animated (Dogwoof).
By introducing their animation early on, Life, Animated and Camp 14: Total Control Zone both establish the use of aesthetically distinct and distinctive animation as part of the ‘world’ of the film. There is no striving for invisibility, as such, in the way that photorealistic animation might, and these animated segments could not be described as working in Hight’s ‘graphic verité mode’. They are instead, much like Bowling for Columbine and Age of Stupid, using digital tools to create animation that looks like analogue animation. Yet, the strategies used still work to make the animation’s appearance seamless and untroubling to the viewer. In these films, as in Searching for Sugar Man, the ontological and aesthetic difference between live action is smoothed over, albeit using different strategies that do not depend on digital animation’s photorealism. We are cued in other ways to accept the use of animation within the film’s aesthetic and narrative logic. As such, the animation in Camp 14 and Life, Animated can also be described as ‘connective tissue’. What these examples suggest is that whether or not animated segments in live action documentaries are disruptive interjections is not so much about what they look like, but how they are interwoven into the documentary as a whole. The following examples will show that such embedding can be facilitated by sound design as much as narrative positioning and editing techniques.
Cobain: Montage of Heck (dir. Brett Morgen, 2015) is another documentary about a musician that uses animation to reconstruct historical scenes for which no original filmed material exists. One such example takes place nearly 40 minutes in to the film where animation is made to accompany a sound montage that Cobain made in 1988 (and that gives the film its title). Here, animation provides a reconstruction of Cobain loafing around his house, playing guitar, recording distorted voices into a tape machine, watching TV. The animation could be described as stylized photorealism. Cobain and his environment are clearly identifiable and created in a realistic style: there is no caricature and the colours and proportions of characters and background are realistic. While the animation is photorealistic, it is not potentially aesthetically indistinguishable in the way that the animation in Searching for Sugar Man is. It has an element of stylization that might be familiar to viewers who have seen Morgen’s earlier documentary Chicago 10 (2007) or the rotoshopped animation created by Bob Sabiston in for example, A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006) and Waking Life (dir. Richard Linklater, 2001), as well as several animated documentaries directed by Sabiston. Neither does the film use visual parity cues such as the dissolves between live action and animation that are seen in Searching for Sugar Man. This means the animation in Cobain: Montage of Heck is not particularly aesthetically consistent with the film’s live action material. However, it still works in a ‘connective’ rather than a ‘disruptive’ way due to other aesthetic and narrative strategies that are employed.
One such strategy, one that is also used in Searching for Sugar Man, is the use of sound bridges. In Searching for Sugar Man, a Rodriguez song (‘Crucify Your Mind’) is heard before the animated sequence (as discussed at the outset of this article) and it begins and continues until after it finishes, helping to knit together the different visual elements and create a sense of coherence and continuity. This also occurs in Montage of Heck. Prior to the animated sequence beginning, we see the exterior of a house as the ‘montage’ begins on the soundtrack. The sound bridges as the image cuts to the animated scene of the inside of the house. The sound in this sequence also helps connect another style of animation that is seen in this scene: Cobain’s journals (which are seen in animated form frequently elsewhere in the film too).
I would argue that, in general, sound plays a significant part in connecting, or not, animated segments with the live action documentaries in which they appear. In Judith Hefland and Daniel B Gold’s (2004) climate change documentary, Everything’s Cool, the animated sections, created by Emily Hubley and Jeremiah Dickey, are aesthetically distinct from the film’s live action. They are not photorealistic and, in terms of how they look, they do not seamlessly blend into the film in the way that much of the animation in, for example, Searching for Sugar Man does. The visual contrast between animation and live action in Everything’s Cool is more reminiscent of Bowling for Columbine and The Age of Stupid, yet the film lacks the connective cuing offered in Camp 14 and Life, Animated. I would argue, however, that the animated sequences in Everything’s Cool still connect, rather than interject. Rather than disrupting the narrative or tone of the overall film, they directly reinforce it. In Everything’s Cool, this reinforcement is constructed not through the use of sound bridges, but the voiceover narration. In the film’s third animated sequence, which lasts less than a minute, the animation is used to clarify something that is seen directly prior: a statement from then-President George W Bush regarding the US spend on research into climate change. An image of Bush speaking at a press conference fades to a brief animated sequence that gives a graphic representation of how climate change research gets assimilated from the scientists to the policy makers via one government organization that reads and disseminates it. The animation, which has a hand-drawn aesthetic, is accompanied by an explanatory voiceover that says ‘actually, what President Bush meant to say …’ as the live action segues to an animated sequence that counteracts Bush’s claims. Similarly, at the end of the sequence, the narrator says ‘meet Rick Piltz …’ as the image fades from animation to a live action image of Rick Piltz walking down the street. In this way, this and the other two animated sequences in Everything’s Cool are firmly embedded into the film’s narrative and rhetorical flow by virtue of a guiding voiceover narration, even though they are aesthetically very different from the rest of the film. 9
Everything’s Cool, Cobain: Montage of Heck, Camp 14: Total Control Zone and Life, Animated are examples of documentaries that work subtly to equate the photographic and animated, which are given parity in terms of the films’ arguments and narratives. Their animated sequences are, then, much like the ones in Searching for Sugar Man, connective rather than disruptive. They do not abruptly interrupt and are thus different to the animated segments in The Age of Stupid and Bowling for Columbine that are interjections by virtue of not only looking different to the rest of their respective documentaries but also due to the way in which they are inserted into the film. For example, in Bowling for Columbine, the narrator delivering the voiceover is only heard in this sequence (the rest of the film is narrated by Moore). It also stands apart because the film does not overtly acknowledge its presence in its midst. It abruptly interrupts the previously established live action grammar of the film, with no precursor. It ends equally abruptly. The only extent to which the film directly engages with the content of the animation is immediately following the end of the sequence, over an archival image of a sticker on a door that says ‘this home is prepared’, when Michael Moore says ‘or did they?’ in response to the final words of the animation narration: ‘And everyone lived happily ever after.’ Similarly the ‘War for Resources’ sequence in The Age of Stupid disrupts the flow of the documentary not just because it looks different, but also because it is unexpected and unacknowledged, visually and orally.
Conclusion
Lev Manovich (2001: 309) has observed that digital animation perpetuates the long-held Hollywood trait of making the apparatus of filmmaking invisible. Just as Hollywood classical realism, ‘in which images function as unretouched photographic records of events that took place in front of the camera’, works to elide the camera and the role of the editor, so too now is the presence of the computer made invisible. While ‘most Hollywood releases now involve digitally manipulated scenes, the use of computers is always carefully hidden.’ The invisibility of the cinematic, and now digital, apparatus is part of the ‘process of disavowal’ of realism, as Manovich has called it after Jean-Louis Comolli (p. 186). It is for this reason, in part, that realism in cinema is often equated with a lack of political potency. Whilst, as Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni (1971), and many others since their treatise ‘Cinema/ideology/criticism’ observe, all film is political, politically radical cinema is often formally radical (and vice versa). Films that draw the audience’s attention to the form of cinema generate questions about the means of representation and also about how we see the world. Craig Hight (2008: 28) has suggested, as noted above, that digital animation techniques are integrated into primetime television documentary in a way that is not designed to generate ontological debate in the viewer. Thus, the animation that appears embedded in many live action films and television documentary is not being used in a particularly critical way – it is not designed to make us question the nature of moving images and their ability to represent reality. I would argue that it is also the case in the ‘connective’ examples explored above, none of which are intended to generate reflexivity about either the documentary’s form or its content. On the other hand, animated interjections, whilst also not necessarily intended to make us question the validity and viability of realist, live action documentary imagery, do carry the potential of critical, political impact by virtue of disrupting the flow of the realist imagery that is the standard means of representation in documentary. Thus, disruptive animated interjections tend to be seen in films that have stronger political or activist messages.
The animated interjections in The Age of Stupid and Bowling for Columbine, by virtue of disrupting the narrative flow and aesthetic coherence of their documentaries, play a significant part in the films’ rhetorical strategies. The segments act as ’thematic and tonal punctuation’ (Honess Roe, 2013: 10) that, because they are unexpected, are attention-grabbing moments of excess. In this way, they are similar to song-and-dance numbers and other spectacular moments in fiction films that, as Laura Mulvey (2009: 716) has suggested, stand outside the cohesive progression of the film’s narrative. The animated interjections in Bowling for Columbine and The Age of Stupid likewise stand outside the cohesive progression of their documentary narratives in all the aesthetic and formal ways outlined above. Visually and orally, they are the equivalent of saying ‘Wow!’ in the middle of a conversation and they can be seen in films that seek to construct a shock to viewers, or highlight a point where sharp notice is required in order to potentially catalyse a reaction (political critique, action against climate change) from the audience.
As such, both films would still work as a coherent documentary were these animated sections to be removed, something that cannot be said of the documentaries discussed that include connective animated segments. Equally, the animated sections are self-contained – they are themselves independently coherent, also something that is not true in the case of connective animation. However, despite this separateness, moments of animated interjection also contribute to the arguments being made by each film and the rhetorical power of the animated interjection is greatly amplified by being viewed in the context of the documentary in which it originally appeared. The segments in Bowling for Columbine and The Age of Stupid neatly conflate geography and history in a way that encapsulates their respective documentary’s argument. In The Age of Stupid, Hodgson’s animation demonstrates that the history of Western exploitation and colonialism is responsible for the more recent changes in the global climate. The animated interjection makes this knock-on effect plainly clear because of the way animation can condense space and time, and make smooth and swift visual connections between temporally and geographically distant, yet politically related, events. A similar chain of cause-and-effect based on inequality and exploitation is suggested in the ‘History of America’ animated interjection in Bowling for Columbine. Rhetorically, the animation works in the same way in both films. It is, essentially, a jolt for the viewer. ‘Hey!’ the sudden and unannounced change in visual register metaphorically shouts at us, ‘this is important.’ Both films then proceed to lay their arguments out in a condensed, clear, yet memorable way. In The Age of Stupid the animation strongly reinforces the documentary’s argument that because humans are responsible for global warming, they are the only ones who can do anything to stop it and it thus plays an important part in the activist impact the film is hoping for. The Age of Stupid and Bowling for Columbine use animated interjections to highlight and hammer home their political agendas regarding climate change and gun crime in the hopes that audiences will be motivated to change the world. Searching for Sugar Man and Cobain: Montage of Heck and the other documentaries discussed above whose animated segments function in a ‘connective’ way have no such political intentions. This is true even in the case of Everything’s Cool, where the animated segments have less political or critical impact in and of themselves, despite the film’s overall political message.
It is true, however, that the animation used in an animated segment in a live action documentary often has meaning, regardless of whether the segment is connective tissue or a disruptive interjection. In particular, the style of animation used has an expressive potential to communicate something beyond that which is conveyed in live action. 10 For example, in Life, Animated the sketchy line animation that appears throughout the film is based on Owen Suskind’s own drawings of Disney characters, and the animation company Mac Guff were chosen for their ‘ability to create animation with a sense of romance’ (Roston, 2016), a sense that fitted with Owen’s own affinity for pre-computer-generated animation as well as the upbeat and sentimental tone of the documentary. The animation in Camp 14 has been described as ‘evoking an oppressive atmosphere’ through its ‘subdued’ brown and grey palette (Bitel, 2014). That the animation style creates meaning is true also of disruptive examples, as discussed above. However, what I have argued here is that the political, critical potential of the animation depends not so much on what the animation looks like, and whether or not it is photorealistic, 11 but on how it is woven, or not, into the live action documentary in which it appears. In my previous work on animated documentary, I have suggested that animation has the capacity to expand the range and depth of what documentaries can be about by, for example, conveying things that are beyond the limitations of representation through live action imagery. One could argue that animated segments within otherwise live action documentaries, whilst not animated documentaries in their own right, are part of this epistemological expansion. However, there is also something more at play, I have argued. In addition, animation within live action documentary can be seen as having a rhetorical potential that illustrates the critical, political possibilities of animation within a live action context. Such potential is one that is increasingly achievable as the tools and technologies of digital animation become more available to documentary filmmakers.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments regarding an earlier draft of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.