Animating Truth: Documentary and Visual Culture in the 21st Century

In today’s visual culture, animation is at an interesting turning point, poised between fiction and fact, perhaps combining the two. We are increasingly confronted with ubiquitous animated images, videos, and gifs, for example, on smartphones, computers, in airplanes, doctors’ offices, schools, and many more, which are all used uncritically to represent or express real events, feelings, processes, and interactions [1]. At the same time, animation’s traditional association with fiction (and, in particular, fantasy fiction) has become less dominant, but that does not mean that animation is no longer a form of escapist, artificial, spectacular, and often child-oriented entertainment [2]. This post will examine the increasingly blurred boundaries between fact and fiction within contemporary CG animated films that involve varying degrees of factual data visualization, exploring their relation to animated documentaries in an era of virtualization.

Fig. 1 - Ralph Breaks the Internet (Phil Johnston & Rich Moore, 2018).

Walt Disney’s 2018 CG animated film Ralph Breaks the Internet (aka Wreck-It Ralph 2) visualizes the internet in a spatial-urban-architectural mode for the sake of the film’s narrative (Fig. 1). Since animation excels at visually simplifying complex systems and processes, it is used pervasively as a means of data visualization, translating data into graphic representations of information that are more easily consumed and understood. Ralph Breaks the Internet is therefore a compelling example of the multi-layered use of animation in visual culture in which multiple realms are each depicted in a different animated style: 1) the supposedly non-animated ‘real’ world of humans using the internet; 2) the users’ online animated representations portrayed within the computer space as box-headed avatars; and 3) the well-known fictional animation characters, such as Ralph himself or even Disney’s princesses that appear as intertextual references within the film. First glimpsed in their ‘traditional’ costumes, the Disney princesses are quickly redressed more informally, thus distancing them from their respective fictional worlds through visual choices that represent them in a more contemporary manner. This change in design also places them closer in resemblance to the internet users depicted in the film, and to the viewers themselves. Comparably, Ralph Breaks the Internet’s illustration of Twitter resembles the bluebirds in Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), merging recognizable fictional animated imagery of the past with contemporary animated data visualization and popular logos.

This complex use of animation blurs the difference between the representational choices most often used in the past and animation’s historic use as a primary way that fantasy onscreen has been visualized. In earlier examples of popular fantasy cinema, such as Robert Stevenson’s 1964 Mary Poppins and Lionel Jeffries’ 1978 The Water Babies, the break between fantastical animated worlds and the so-called ‘real’ was well-defined and stylistically unmistakable. Animation is used to demarcate the boundaries between different fictional spaces – one fictionally ‘real’, and one coded as more of a fantasy environment. By contrast, there is a merging in Ralph Breaks the Internet of multiple animation styles that symbolize the physical ‘real’ world of the viewer, viewers’ online virtual actions, and fantastical content, complicating the many uses, signification, and meaning of animation.

Fig. 2 - Tower (Keith Maitland, 2016).

Beyond mainstream Hollywood animation, it is within the growing field of animated documentaries that the interesting and increasingly unclear tension between the way animation was used in the past, often associated with fiction, and the way it is used today, as highly visible in varied non-fiction fields, is most evident. The imagery in animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), for example, is indirectly used to question the difference between animation and photography, and to reflect upon different modes of representation that are accepted as credible, legitimate documentation. Almost a decade later, these issues between animation, fantasy and reality persist, as seen in the award-winning animated documentary Tower (Keith Maitland, 2016) about America’s first mass shooting in 1966 at the University of Texas, Austin (Fig. 2). Director Keith Maitland described his apprehension about reaching out to survivors with: “Hey, you don’t know me, but I want to make a movie about the worst thing that ever happened to you 50 years ago, and it’s going to be a cartoon. Let’s talk!” His unease about audiences’ reactions to the portrayal of tragic events in animated form reveals that despite the recent rise of animated documentaries — and the vast range of topics animation now covers — something of animation’s assumed link to fiction, childhood, humour and lightheartedness perseveres [3]. Thus, questions related to the nature of the reality being depicted, and whether animation as a visual fantasy is the most suitable means for its truthful portrayal, play a central role in these two films.

Understanding the proliferating uses of animation and the medium’s uncertain position as a form of credible visualization demands a reconsideration of the status of animation, and its uses in contemporary visual culture [4]. It is impossible to comprehend animation’s use and role in documentary today without considering the technological modifications in new media, which have reshaped the contemporary world and the wider depiction of non-fiction information. Although factual data visualization may increasingly become part of fantasy animation, as in Ralph Breaks the Internet, once the visual language of documentary changes and viewers become accustomed to non-photorealistic imagery in varied non-fiction fields, the question is what happens when viewers can no longer tell which is which, which is fiction and which is non-fiction? What do we believe then - do we believe everything or nothing at all? In a culture characterized by screens where imagery plays a central role, what is the consequent status of visual culture’s truth claims?

Notes

[1] See Leslie and McKim, “Life remade,” 207.

[2] For theorists who engage with animation’s assumed fictitious nature, see Ward, “Animating with facts,” 294; Skoller, “Introduction to the special issue,” 207; Cavell, The World Viewed, 167. See also Holliday and Sergeant, eds. Fantasy/Animation. It may be argued that animation has concerned itself with the ‘real’ for a long time and in varied ways, as seen in examples such as Norman McLaren’s Neighbors (1952), Disney's Seven Wise Dwarfs (1941), which featured the Snow White (David Hand, 1937) dwarfs marching to the Post Office to purchase war-time savings certificates, or Jimmy Murakami’s When the Wind Blows (1986), based on Raymond Briggs’ graphic novel of the same name. Esther Leslie’s Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002) that discusses animation, politics and modernist criticism is an important book to mention in this context. That said, these examples (a) emphasize the blurred boundaries between the representational, the fantastical, the educational, interpretive, documentary, propaganda, etc., and (b) are the minority in a field that has more commonly been considered niche, associated with fantasy and researched under that guise.

[3] The longstanding assumption that animation must stand in complicated relation to documentary stems from a persistent bias associating animation with fantasy and humour, due to the worldwide dominance of American commercial animation. See Gunnar Strøm, "The Animated Documentary", Animation Journal 11 (2003): 48.

[4] Similar themes underpin the theoretical basis of my forthcoming book Animating Truth (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, 2020) about the rise of animated documentary in contemporary virtualized culture and the era of post-truth. By evaluating animation’s intersection with varied fields of contemporary visual culture, I expand the theoretical scope for analysis of animation as documentary visualization, and introduce new approaches to the meaning and impact of the animated image in our time. Animating Truth defines three key areas relating animation to documentary: the evidentiary status of animation as documentary imagery, the relationship between animation and the prevailing technoculture, and the aesthetics of ‘the real’. My aim is to understand how the rise of non-fiction animated imagery in the 21st century virtualized culture stands as a visual paradigm shift that influences viewers both ethically and politically, and what epistemological ramifications this transformation in non-fiction aesthetics may evoke.

**Article published: April 24, 2020**

References

Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ebiri, Bilge. 2017. “Keith Maitland gets animated discussing his powerful documentary Tower,” LA Weekly (January 18, 2017), available at: http://www.laweekly.com/film/keith-maitland-gets-animated-discussing-his-powerful-documentary-tower-7834226.

Holliday, Christopher and Alexander Sergeant (eds.). 2018. Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres. New York: Routledge.

Leslie, Esther and Joel McKim. 2017. “Life remade: Critical animation in the digital age.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12, no. 3: 207–213.

Skoller, Jeffrey. 2011. “Introduction to the special issue 'Making it (un)real: Contemporary theories and practices in documentary animation.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 6, no. 3: 207–214.

Strøm, Gunnar. 2003. “The animated documentary.” Animation Journal 11: 46–63.

Ward, Paul. 2011. “Animating with facts: The performative process of documentary animation.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 6, no. 3: 293–305.

Biography

Dr. Nea Ehrlich is a lecturer in the Department of Arts at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. She completed her PhD in the Department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh and was a Polonsky postdoctoral fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is the author of articles on animation and documentary and animation as an alternative to photorealism, and is co-editor of Drawn from Life, the 2018 anthology about animated documentaries published by Edinburgh University Press. Her work lies at the intersection of Art History, Film Studies, Animation, Digital Media Theory, Gaming and Epistemology. In 2011 she co-organized the Animated Realities conference at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The conference was the first conference on animated documentary and included over 40 international speakers and a screening program, which Nea co-curated, in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She is currently working on a project on art and robotics, focusing on AI and machine vision. Her next book, on animated documentary and the virtualization of culture in the 21st century, is forthcoming in 2020 by Edinburgh University Press.