"why use a 'cartoon' to tell a real story"

Searching through youtube I found an interesting BBC news report on 'the rise of the animated documentary'. Ironically this News clip starts on the end of a clip of russian soldiers during the south ossetia conflict, then clips from Waltz with bashir are shwon not long afterwards, similar to that news footage clip.

the journalist asks the question 'why use a cartoon to tell a war story?'

As previously mentioned i think this is why WWB is so important in the history of modern animated documentary, nowadays animation is still regularly reffered to in a most derogatory way as 'Cartoons' which has a connotation of simplistic childlike, entertainment.
Animated documentaries have most often throughout their past history been pieces of either surreal painterly interpretations or playing on a nostalgic childlike cartoon for empathy/impact; And i believe this has been a dualism of strength & weakness for the genre.

Also mentioned is the increasingly potent link between animated documentary & Graphic Novel accounts, Which I will be writing about in a seperate post

Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir is a 2008 animated feature length documentary based around interviews & memories of the lebanon war.



It starts like an animated fiction film with a highly stylised, animated dream sequence. A ferocious pack of black dogs tears down a city street at twilight, mouths foaming and eyes ablaze, hell bent on destruction, as the soundtrack booms with a pounding, menacing bass line. The dream belongs to Ari’s friend and former comrade, which he connects to his time serving in action. This acts as a catalyst to Folman’s project: he realises his subconscious has blanked out the period he spent with the military in Lebanon, so he sets out to find out what happened to him by interviewing old friends and comrades



The stream of personal anecdotes and, as said earlier, dreams, made it impossible for Folman to show real footage of what he/interviewees experienced. After all, how do you show a live-action dream sequence in a documentary without making it look corny? Hence the winning choice of rendering the whole story through animation, with just one exception (the final scene, the one that contextualises the stark depressing reality of the war, consists of real filmed material). This gives the picture a feel that is both evocative and down-to-earth.

What i find personally astounding and original about WWB is that it knowingly confronts you with the fact that scenes are re-enactments, interpretations of facts and experiences, scenes are surreally animated yet seem to have more of a sense of realism because of it, you cannot watch WWB with neutrality and complete subjectivity to characters and events, you are drawn in first by the knowledge that the events depicted genuinely happened then by the emotional subjectivity you form to the characters/interviewees by the powerful images onscreen.

the switch to archive documentary footage of the real Sabra & Shatila massacre at the films climax, is after all the animated footage, a sobering experience of the real horror of the massacre. However in many reviews, message board posts and articles about the film, people have stated that some of the animated scenes (particularly the war photographers story) had more of an impact on them in terms of thinking about the reality of the horrors of war.
The fact that the animated depicitions have equal or more impact than the live action footage I think is a powerful justification for Animated documentary as a genre, WWB seems to have popularised & expanded on what an animated documentary can be, and that is what i personally believe will be its lasting impact on the history of animated documentary in years to come.

AN INTERVIEW WITH ARI FOLMAN (Dir of Waltz with Bashir)

The Look of Waltz with bashir

The animation, with its dark hues representing the overall feel of the film, uses a unique style invented by Yoni Goodman at the Bridgit Folman Film Gang studio in Israel. The technique is often confused with rotoscoping, an animation style that uses drawings over live footage, but is actually a combination of Adobe Flash cutouts and classic animation.

Each drawing was sliced into hundreds of pieces which were moved in relation to one another, thus creating the illusion of movement. The film was first shot in a sound studio as a 90-minute video and then transferred to a storyboard. From there 2,300 original illustrations were drawn based on the storyboard, which together formed the actual film scenes using Flash animation, classic animation, and 3D technologies

Ive posted an example of how a a shot is animated using Flash CS4



An extremely thorough & explanative interview with Director of Animation Yoni Goodman about how waltz with Bashir was created

How long was the animation process and how many people worked on the animation?
The animation process took 2-2.5 years. We began with six animators (including myself) and got up to 10 animators. So, the whole crew consisted of about 25 people more or less

What animation techniques did you employ to create such vivid imagery?
We used a Flash cutouts animation technique specially designed for this project for all parts of the animation, sometimes slightly adding traditional animation to the process. we also used very few shots using 3d, but only for camera movements and such. There was absolutely no Rotoscope animation throughout the entire project. Every time someone mentions rotoscope I get angry calls from my animators in the middle of the night.

Tell us about the whole rotoscoping confusion…
Well, Waltz with Bashir has 0% rotoscoping in it. We keep fighting the rumor that we rotoscoped, as many people compared our process to Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Waking life, but the whole movie is Flash cutouts. We did have live reference of the interviewees, but we just used it to learn the movements. There was absolutely no tracing over a video.



David has this great dark, graphic novel, contoured look which we really wanted to use, so I had to come up with a technique that we could work with, and still refrain from doing it in traditional animation. Traditional animation features typically employ 200-300 people. There are the keyframers and inbetweeners and colorists and cleanup artists, but we just don’t have enough experienced manpower in Israel, and no budget to outsource it, so we used cutouts instead.

Every drawing made by David was sliced into many pieces in Flash, sometimes counting to 400 pieces per character, and they were set up in different levels of hierarchy. So like normal cutouts in Flash, we split a character into primary pieces – head, torso, limbs etc.. Each of these was symbolized, and inside each symbol we had another set of layers containing the parts it was made of. This complexity didn’t allow us to draw much of anything from scratch, as we were maintaining David’s original line. Eventually was done using 10 animators (including myself).

Once an illustrator had finished the artwork for a particular scene, explain the process of preparing that layout for animation.
Once an illustration was complete (mostly by David, he illustrated something like 80% of the movie), the image was imported to Flash, traced and broken into pieces. The sliced pieces would then be converted to symbols and set in their appropriate hierarchies. Then we would place the sound and the animatic inside the file (after the animatic was done, we sliced the sound according to the shot’s length, that way we knew when it was supposed to end in the FLA). The animatic was placed as reference for timing and acting in a guide layer, and then the animation process began. The first part, moving the main symbols, requires some skill, because things never look completely right – joints are usually breaking and the movement looks very stiff.

Once the main symbols are done, we went into the secondary hierarchy to animate each symbol and compensate for the stiffness, creating a smoother look for the animation. Usually you work in and out, back and forth – sometimes correcting the main symbols after you are done with the inner hierarchy, then going inside and adjusting the new positions. It sounds terribly complicated, and in a way it really is, but still, to get that very fine clean movement, it’s a lot faster (and easier to correct) then traditional animation.

At the end of it all, I think there were less than 10 percent of the film was traditionally animated. The only scene that was fully created using traditional animation was the waltz scene.



It sounds like very little CGI animation was employed in the film, but many sequences appear to have so much depth. Do people often mistake the animation for CGI?

A few month ago I went to Annecy film festival, where Waltz with Bashir was the opening movie, and in my speech, as part of my ongoing campaign to deny the rotoscope rumors, I said “this movie has no rotoscoping in it” (my animators asked me to say it). Later on, someone told me there was a rumour that it was all done in CGI. So much for fighting rumours. We had very few shots (10 or so) in which we used Maya, but that was mainly for camera movements. There was no actual modeling, except for a ship and a few houses in the snow which you can see with a very good telescope.

I think most combinations between 2D and 3D animation don’t work so well, and we really tried to make the 3d environment as flat looking as we possibly could. We just placed the Flash animated sequences on flat planes in the 3D environment and moved a camera through them so we could get a depth-of-field feeling. We also got to a point where people mistook very complex Flash cutouts for CGI. For instance, the scene where the tanks are squashing cars, but these parts were all done in Flash. We didn’t do animation in any other software (unless you regard the explosions as animation. These were done in After Effects).


How else did you use After Effects on the project?

Every shot in the movie was exported as PNG files and rebuilt in Adobe After Effects. The smoke, explosions and simple camera movements in the movie are all done in AFX. We also used grains and filters to avoid the vector look Flash usually gives.

With all of the various pieces that went into each element, did the software ever strain under the weight of your production?

As we used highly-detailed symbols with lots of inner-hierarchies, the more you got into the nested timelines, the heavier the FLA would become. Some work files got to a point where they could not be opened on a computer with less than 4 GB of RAM. This is actually the main reason why we only worked with one shot per FLA, and no shot over 40 seconds per FLA, otherwise it would crash the software or make it impossible to work with.

Flash is a sort of a blessing and a curse all at once. It’s a format I find very handy, very easy to produce high quality animation, and it’s very easy to correct and fix animations (once you learn how to build the file correctly), but at the same time, it still has the “internet animation software” attitude to it. I always feel like I’m abusing the software by doing things it wasn’t designed to do, and it’s a shame, because I feel it can do so much more. I’ve been using Flash since version 4, and it doesn’t seem like there have been many improvements in the broadcast field. I actually think Flash MX was much better at handling heavy files and high-rez exports than any other version that came after it.

I have many ideas, and I also read many thoughts (in your site as well) how to improve Flash in that aspect. I think Flash needs to evolve into a broadcast-quality-specific animation software, perhaps as a separate “Flash-based” software that uses all of it’s features but is strong enough to handle the strain. Ari Folman once tried to approach Macromedia (they were the owners then) after we finished “the material that love is made of” and the pitch to present some of our thoughts but they sort of snubbed him out of the building. I would be really happy if they decided to improve the software in that direction.

Ellie Land

Ellie Land is a young animated documentary filmmaker and an ex student of Royal college of art.
She mentored me on my first foray into animated documentary as part of the northern stars film academy back in 2006, on an animated docu-film called 'Spiked' (Will post on my blog soon as i get it up on youtube!)

Ellie has created films about sensitive or culturally specific subjects such as: accounts of forced female circumcision:

EVERYTHING WAS LIFE
A short film about the practice of female circumcision



MEMORIES OF REDCAR: a travelogue film about young peoples views on Redcar





SHARING SPACES: a film debating how to use public space in Walker

"The group's experiences and memories of public spaces in Walker and Newcastle were documented, and the dialogue audio recorded and edited into short soundtracks for the animation. To illustrate their ideas and aspirations for the new public spaces, participants used a wide selection of materials, 2-D images and found objects, as well as their own drawings and models. The outcome is a light-hearted short film that offers a new perspective and raises questions about public space and its uses."
Ellie Land



DIE ANDERE SEITE

Ellies latest project was Die Andere Seite (the other side) about memories of the berlin wall

Die Andere Seite from Ellie Land on Vimeo.

the Animated Documentary Dichotomy pt 1

Animated documentary has traditionally had a dichotomy between serious subjects poignantly animated & Comically animated pieces based on our real actions & spoken words.
The most popular/populist examples of animated documentary are all more based in comedy or comic drama, which begs the question: are audiences uncomfortable seeing realistic animation & troublesome subjects?

CREATURE COMFORTS

Nick Parks creature comforts series is a comical stop motion animation series based on interviews with people about several subjects. the humour comes from not just the peoples speeches but the visual comic pairing of an animal that suits/contrasts the personality of the voice



SURVIVORS

Sheila Sofain is an animated documentary creator who often deals with controversial & unsettling topics such as in Survivors a expressionist painting style animation of domestic abuse tales

Sheila Sofian on Survivors
"My film Survivors is an animated documentary about domestic violence. I interviewed women who were survivors of violent relationships, professionals who counsel them, as well as a man who councils abusive men. The interviews are illustrated using surreal, expressionistic drawn animation. The audience reaction has been interesting. One observation that people have mentioned several times is if they had seen the film as a live-action documentary, they would have judged the person speaking based on their appearance. However, they were unable to make such a judgement when viewing Survivors, since the viewer never saw the actual person who was speaking. They told me that this allowed them to empathize with the person who was interviewed in a way they would not have been able to if it had been a live action film.
Some people have found this “forced empathy” problematic"

ABDUCTEES

Abductees is somewhere between the serious and the comical Docu-Animation, based on interviews and hypnotic regression tapes the subject can either be insightful or comical depending on personal opinion, and the animation can be parodying or complementary to the narrative.

Winsor McCay

As a Major foundation point in the history of Animation, Documentary & Animated Documentary, Winsor McCays 1918 newsreel about the sinking of the ship Lusitania was influential. It was the first time animation had been used as a serious re-enactment of a factual event and one of the building blocks of animated documentary as a genre/film form

J.R. Bray and the educational animated short

"By definition, the line between the educational and documentary film is a thin one, if it is even there at all. Educational shorts as a whole are an interesting type of film; their purpose is obviously to teach, but one could argue that is the purpose of a documentary film is as well.
The task of defining documentary animated film is a slippery one. There are many pieces of work that could be considered documentary even though they don’t fit neatly into a dictionary definition of the term"
Noell Wolfgram Evans

In considering Animated documentary i felt that i have to look at every aspect of it, even instructional animated films are technically within the realms of animated documentary. The early films of JR Bray are important in the history of animation & documentary and blur the line between the two, they are created to inform as much as entertain. Just because they are not in considered within the Modus Operandi of Minstream film-making does'nt mean they arent worth considering in my research into the history and techniques of Animated Documentary.

J.R.Bray
John Randolph Bray (25 August 1879, Detroit - 10 October 1978, Bridgeport, Connecticut) produced the first animation film in color The Debut of Thomas Cat (1920) Bray Productions produced over 500 films between 1913 and 1937, mostly animation films and documentary shorts. Overall he produced well over 1000 films.

He visited Winsor McCay during his production of Gertie the Dinosaur and claimed to be a journalist writing an article about animation. McCay was very open about the techniques that he developed and showed all the details to Bray. John Randolph Bray later patented many of McCay's methods and tried to sue him.

Bray started the Jam Handy Organization, which began as a Chicago-Detroit division of Bray Studios, to service the auto industry's need for industrial films. Jam Handy made several thousand industrial and sponsored animated films and tens of thousands of filmstrips