Draw me a sheep
What is it in animation that gets such a different hold of us viewers?
Two feature animation films that I happened to watch recently in the cinema are actually auto-biographic documentaries which bring an outsider personal retrospective quest through Islamic societies and make a rather new use of animation. The two experiments, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman, first make me wonder about the choice of animation as the method.
While Folman is using a sophisticated detailed animation, Satrapi chose to stick to a distinctively simple style mainly in black and white, loyal to her book (and no, I’m not going to deal with the worn-out question of the paper to celluloid transition. At least not this time). If Folman believed that the difficult experiences described in the film would become more accessible if they’re served drawn, the few later scenes in color in Persepolis made it clear that, like a large number of movies in the film history, Satrapi uses black and white to differentiate her childhood scenes from those of her adulthood. And speaking of authenticity, it really bothered me that all the characters in Persepolis (except two sentences in the radio) are speaking French and not Farsi.
In an interview to Haaretz, David Polonsky, the Art Director of Waltz with Bashir, is quoted as saying “our film deals with the memory and the falseness of memory. The moment I draw someone’s story, I emphasize the fact that it’s not objective”. However, in another case, Polonsky confirmed my suspicion and admitted that the choice of using animation was indeed a sort of commercial gimmick – one that allowed this movie gain a lot more attention than it would have probably get if it wasn’t animated. And if there’s anything that emphasizes the point of weakness of documentary animation the most, is the film’s last couple of minutes of archive videos.
Even despite one major narrative failure (the fact that Folman’s character is driven by the quest for his personal role in the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, but completely ignores it in two optional discoveries in the movie), I still believe Waltz with Bashir is an important movie to the Israeli society confronting it with an horrific part of its history that it keeps denying.
I’ve been easily caught by the charming and wise character of Satrapi and the narrative attitude steering between cynical humor and horrible experiences (well, actually, already in the book). And besides, I’m always glad to get a glimpse into different cultures, and I find the Iranian one especially intriguing.
But it should also be noted that both movies appeal to an audience which is mostly comprised of the same bourgeois and educated part of society that the two filmmakers come from, in each of the different cases.
And all in all, I tend to believe that the use of animation in this kind of stories might indeed gain the viewer’s empathy, but I’m afraid that at the same time it frames these stories outside of of reality and keeps them as a fairytale with less powerfull of a message than than they could have delivered. Both films plant the personal stories within major historical events, but yet tend to lack the level of authenticity they thrive for when describing real people and real events.
