An Eyeful of Sound © Samantha Moore, funded by the Wellcome Trust

Samantha Moore reflects on three recent conferences - Visible Evidence, documentary studies conference, Bogazici University, Istanbul August 2010; Animation Evolution (Society for Animation Studies conference), Edinburgh School of Art July 2010; and American Synesthesia Association conference 2010, Vanderbilt University, Nashville USA October 2010.

Animated documentaries are apparently seen by the wider film theory community as an anamorphic blob of confusion, part of some messy Venn diagram that straddles animation, documentary, science films, and biopics. According to one documentary theorist I met at the recent Visible Evidence documentary studies conference in Istanbul, animated documentary is seen as being rather ill-defined and faddish, viewed by some theorists as being on a par with documentary computer games and other shifting fashions on the margins of documentary. Some of the documentary theorists I spoke to found animation an unexplored territory that they claimed to be reluctant to engage with because animation is so incredibly varied a form, and they felt ill-qualified to discuss its technical aspects.

However, some academics – Dr Bella Honess Roe, amongst others – are beginning to untangle the myriad strands of the genre in the conference arena. Honess Roe differentiates between mimetic animated documentary (eg photo realistic Walking with dinosaurs style which we are meant to read as ‘reality), non-mimetic work (based on reality but not pretending to be real, like Aardman’s Creature Comforts) and expressive films (work which shows the artist’s personal view, such as Jonathan Hodgson’s Feeling My Way). This begins to address the problems inherent in defining a genre according to methodology at the expense of content.

At the SAS conference in Edinburgh (July 2010) as well as a general panel session on animated documentary, there were also sessions about neuro-science and animation which comprised of a lot of animated documentary as well as more purely theoretical academic papers. I felt like this was a step forward for the genre. Maybe it’s time to stop getting hung up on the craft based concerns of how the work is made – ie animated – and take a closer look at content and structure. Perhaps it’s a tendency of the medium to get fixated on the methodology rather than the content?

Dr Bella Honess Roe asked at the start of her paper in Istanbul: What can animated documentary do that live action can’t? This is key to defining the genre (if that’s what it is) and is the reason I get annoyed with animated documentaries which use animation simply as a stylistic device, when it could be used to bring a unique perspective to the subject.

There are films that contain facts (or ‘fact-like’ information) which are automatically labelled as animated documentary, but which don’t always engage with what a documentary is or why animation should be used to convey it. It’s interesting, though, to guess why ‘animated documentary’ as a term has been adopted so enthusiastically – perhaps because it adds a gravitas that is traditionally unfamiliar, or unacknowledged, in animation, and because it also provides a seductively grown up sounding label in a medium so often associated with children.

At the ASA conference in Nashville neither animation nor documentary were challenged or even discussed. Animated documentary here – within a conference about neuro-psychology, and synaesthesia in particular – was simply seen as a tool for communicating the brain trait of synaesthesia to others. Synaesthesia – the subject of my own film, An Eyeful of Sound -  is a trait experienced in uniquely different ways by each person who has it so there have been many attempts to communicate it through art, most recently using animation. Animator Chad Sikora (working with artist and synaesthete Carol Steen) and Carrie C Firman (a masters student in art and a synaesthete) have both made different but satisfying attempts to convey synaesthesia through their work (see Carrie’s ‘synaesthesia library’). The response and discussion, from an audience of neuro-psychologists and synaesthetes, was entirely based on the content of the work and its ‘correctness’ in conveying synaesthesia, with no interest in form and little in methodology. Whilst this was a conference outside of the film/arts arena, it was nevertheless interesting to experience the difference in approach and attitude there where simply the content was being discussed and evaluated.

There is a loosely defined bundle of attributes under the animated documentary banner which don’t really go very far in conveying the rich and varied potential that it has. In many ways I’m pleased that animated documentary is recognised, but it’s too small a term to carry all that it implies. Animated documentary has become a portmanteau word and it is straining at the seams; it will be interesting to see how future theorists and practitioners begin to unpack it.

About the Author: Samantha Moore developed an interest in animated documentary as a form after making Success with Sweet Peas (2003). She subsequently made doubled up (2004) and  The Beloved Ones (2007). Her film An Eyeful of Sound  (2010) was a Wellcome Trust commission. Samantha teaches at the University of Wolverhampton and has given several papers on animated documentary. She is about to embark on a related Ph.D at the University of Loughborough.