Interjections and Connections: The Critical Potential of Animated Segments in Live Action Documentary[1]
Annabelle Honess Roe
About six minutes into the critically and commercially acclaimed documentary Searching for Sugar Man (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 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 realises the image is animated when it dissolves to its live action counterpart half way 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, fill in gaps left by this absence of archival footage (Searching for Sugar Man, no date). The animation works as ‘connective tissue’ by virtue of being almost aesthetically indistinguishable from the live-action material 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, onethat 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 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 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 at the advent of digital cinema. However, it is undeniable that since around 2000, as digital animation has become increasingly ubiquitous,[2] so too has the appearance of animated sequences in otherwise live action documentaries.[3] 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.
Over the following pages, I will explore the different types of animated segments that are seen in post-2000 live action mainstream documentary.[4] Looking beyond the more familiar ‘graphic expositional mode’ already explored by Hight, 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 utilise 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 thirty 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 State of America’ sequence comes about 50-minutes in to 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, emphasising the tendency to persecute, fight and kill perceived threats to their safety, including Native Americans and ‘witches’. The three-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.[5] It has a ‘cartoony’ quality that comes from its bright colour palette and the way the characters are caricatured by, for example, emphasising certain facial features and making their heads the same size as the rest of their body. The tone of caricature and satirical critique is emphasised 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 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 two-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 global warming. 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 attitude to the ‘History of America’ sequence in Bowling for Columbine, although it is perhaps more pointed and less sardonic in tone.[6]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 Nineteenth 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 sequence is as humbling as it is devastating in the way it makes a connection between the history of colonisation, consumerism and oil consumption. One of the points of the sequence:the tragic trajectory of civilisation, 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 is 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 betweendigital animation and live action, whereas the animation in Bowling for Columbine and the Age of Stupid is a disruptive interjection because it emphasises their ontological distinction.