Fostering Empathy and Compassion through Fantasy/Animation
During the production of my animated film Anna, I began to contemplate questions about the intersection between empathy, animation and fantasy, and how they feed into the value of storytelling through film. The further into production I went, the more interesting and complex this became as I saw how fantasy and storytelling could play a powerful role in developing empathetic sensitivities in both filmmakers and viewers. Anna explores the subjective perception of a man named Gus, who has dementia (Fig. 1). We follow Gus over the course of a single day, during which he suffers several delusions centering around his recently deceased wife. It culminates in an episode where he fully dissociates from the present and, after suffering a particularly vivid dream, runs out into the night to look for her.
Fig. 1 - Dementia sufferer Gus in Anna.
Exploring the topic of dementia, which was based around my experiences with my own grandfather, I had to engage empathetically with Gus’ experience of the world. This turned out to be a different sort of challenge than I had anticipated as it took me into the realm of something close to fantasy. Often, delusions in dementia sufferers take on the form of paranoia. The individual is often so certain of the truth in their perceived reality that it is difficult to try and contradict them and bring them back to our reality, no matter how dark the one they are experiencing may be. Telling them they are delusional or suffering hallucinations often seems to make them feel isolated, misunderstood or suspicious.
Fantasy becomes integral to not only the patient, but also those interacting with them, as entering this person’s ‘fantasy’ can sometimes help mitigate some of this distress. For example, often something on the TV or the radio would escape from the confines of fiction and make their way into my grandpa’s reality. In one instance, a David Attenborough documentary affected his perceived truth so strongly that he became convinced his small dog ‘Poppy’ must be freezing in the Arctic, and that she was in danger from polar bears. To help quell his fears, I procured the dog in question and assured him that her trip there was a success and she was warm - and safe from bears. This acceptance of his reality, and in-world solution to the problem he presented (she had returned home safe), was important to prevent adding extra stressors to an already disturbing situation – where his reality was a misconception constructed by his brain.
It is easy to see how we might fail to understand each other in situations like these. Empathy, particularly in such difficult circumstances, takes thought and effort. This is where I saw narrative as a potential tool – it helps us understand others by framing a situation as clearly as possible in terms of motivation, thinking and emotion. As short-term and long-term memories begin to degrade in dementia patients, remaining memories can be confused with the present, in effect creating erratic time-travel in the mind. This can make understanding the person even more of a challenge as it makes their thinking seemingly unpredictable. Therefore, myself and the team that produced Anna wanted to focus on illustrating how Gus was really just a man responding appropriately to his understanding of events. We sought to use the animated film as a tool through which to show the real and vulnerable man lost in an incongruous and time-jumping reality – thereby creating empathy with him as a fellow human being (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2 - The collision of past and present in Anna.
The role of empathy is key, and for me is what makes narrative a powerful tool. I believe it manifests in filmmaking in three principal ways. First, from the filmmaker during the writing and creation of the film. Especially in a medium as laborious as animation, the physical construction of a film requires the animator to inhabit the characters over an extended period of time. Each small action of a character (a steadying hand, a glance over their shoulder) can take hours of work in a quiet, dark room, resulting in a truly immersive experience. Second, from character to character within the narrative (either empathy or a deliberate lack of) to tell us about their relationships with one another. Finally, from the viewer - watching these characters through the filmmaker’s lens and experiencing their lives with them. In creating my film, I had to explore what might trigger different dementia-related delusions, and what they might feel like and motivate Gus to do. In turn, the film asks the viewer to engage with Gus’ ‘fantasy’, as this is also the narrative world presented to the viewer, in turn compelling them to engage on an empathetic level.
I was curious about the impact this empathy has on both filmmaker and viewer, and found much debate over the topic. There is evidence to suggest that reading fiction can improve our empathy skills in real life: reading fictional stories has been found to be associated with the development of empathy in children. This suggests an important link between empathy felt for fictional characters and developing this skill in real life. To delve deeper, psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock (2000) split the empathy associated with reading fiction into two types – cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand the world from another person’s point of view and to infer beliefs and intentions. Affective empathy, by contrast, refers to the capacity to share another’s feelings and emotions.
As a filmmaker, this meant I could achieve cognitive empathy in a viewer if my directorial choices resulted in a clear and readable sequence of thinking from a character and resulting actions. Affective empathy, according to Green and Brock, is heightened if the reader feels ‘transported’ by the text. Achieving affective empathy (particularly in such a short film) therefore felt harder – to get the viewer to a point where they stopped placing themselves in the viewing experience and began feeling on behalf of the character instead.
However, this is where the medium of film lent its hand. According to David Lodge (2002), a key characteristic of literary fiction is its moment-by-moment account of events, along with the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist. This provides rich opportunity for the reader to exercise cognitive empathy. In contrast, affective empathy - as it is more present when the viewer is transported - may be more present in plays and films where the viewer is less exposed to the inner dialogue of the characters, but carried along in a visual stream of visually depicted external behaviors, environments and interactions.
Fig. 3 - Felted characters as textual metaphor in the character of Gus.
This argument is useful for a filmmaker, as it suggests that animation could exist as a sort of bridge between the two. Animation is free to manipulate material, form, movement and time - not limited by the physical constraints dictated by live action film. This allows it to engage with the inner life of its characters if it so chooses, whilst maintaining the more direct external portrayal of the characters in their environment. In Anna, we were able to use animation to explore the inner experience of Gus’ dementia and subsequent physical response through an external portrayal of the character (Fig. 3) – blending the two modes. The felted characters gave us a textural metaphor we couldn’t have successfully achieved in live action, and the physical animated destruction of the garden and abstract dream sequences similarly were far better expressed with the medium than we could have achieved in live action.
Searching for assurances that narratives have an effect on empathy for the reader or viewer certainly proves complicated, as the relationship between the two remains contentious. Suzanne Keen in Empathy and the Novel demonstrates the prevalence of narrative empathy as an “affective transaction” but remains skeptical of its impact on real world attitudes (Keen 2007: xv). By contrast, psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker argues that storytelling has made us a “nicer” species (in Bartlett 2004). While I can’t speak for mass audiences, from a filmmaker’s perspective, working inside an affected character’s head for months has served me with a much deeper understanding for those suffering dementia. I can better understand others in situations that I previously had considered illogical and beyond understanding. And from a viewer’s perspective, if consuming narrative doesn’t make us better people in action, at least in that moment it allows us to understand someone else - another way of being - and thereby expand our own worlds and thinking.
**Article published: May 8, 2020**
References
Bartlett, Kellie. 2004. “The Moral Clout of Storytelling,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-moral-clout-of/102695.
Green, Melanie, and Timothy Brock. 2000. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 5: 701-721
Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lodge, David. 2002. Consciousness and the Novel. London: Secker.
Biography
Jessica Mountfield is a creative at Animade in London. As a freelance animator and director she has produced work for a range of charities, agencies and government organisations, and has worked on television shows for the BBC and Sky at Karrot Animation. Her directorial debut, Anna, has screened at festivals worldwide and is the recipient of Best Student Animation at the Royal Television Society Awards. It also won the Best British Film at the Canterbury Anifest.