Animation in The Prisoner or: How I planned to Kill Tony Blair

Recently I was shown this film by Yunis Abbas with the lens of looking at the animation and if animation belongs in Documentaries. A medium where the pursuit of truth is a priority and a part of the definition. The film is very powerful and follows Yunis Abbas, a journalist in Iraq, and his experiences in dealing with Suddam Hussein and the U.S. Military. Oddly enough his experiences were strikingly similar. The revolutionary idea was if animation, an art form of complete bias of the creator's imagination, could be combined with, observational footage in pursuit of the truth on a subject matter. In my opinion the answer is, "it depends." Animation in a documentary should always be secondary to the subject, only clarifying what's going on. They use a lot of wonderful animation in this film, sometime it's overzealous, but other times incredibly insightful in helping us to fully perceive Yunis's experiences.

Here is the trailer:

Bring old photos to life

This week in my senior seminar class, exploring the documentary, we checked out the film The Kid Stays in the Picture. It's a documentary about Robert Evans life, an old time Hollywood actor and producer who ran the Hollywood game for a while. The film is almost entirely old photographs that with Robert Evans himself narrating his life story. But this isn't simply a Ken Burns film. The entire film is brought to life with after effects. Here's a cheesy trailer where you can get an idea of the film.

The film itself is worth checking out but I think this demonstrates how powerful a tool aftereffects can be.

Magic Trip Title Sequence

             So earlier in the semester I posted about the documentary Magic Trip in my fiction field class with Arturo. Recently while I was checking out the link to the forget the film website I stumbled upon the opening title sequence to this documentary. As it is one of my favorite documentary films of all time I thought it would only be right to do a breakdown of this sequence. The title sequence was created by Karin Fong, a creative director and designer based in New York City. Alex Gibney an academy-award nominated director/ filmmaker asked Fong in 2009 to design the main and special title sequences for the  epic American road trip which ultimately inspired the peace and social movements of the 1960's.

                      

Fong stated that the paint on film aesthetics were inspired from experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Len Lye. This is an example of frames from a Stan Brakhage film with the paint on film technique.

The author of the article asked Fong if she had ever tried LSD, she described herself as being a "straight arrow." Although not having a personal experience with the powerful psychedelic substance Fong was able to visualize and understand more of its effects by researching Ken Kesey. Ken Kesey is an American author known for authorship of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as well as his major role in the road trip and the acid trials done by the U.S Governement in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Here is a video of the recording and movie insights involved with Ken Kesey and his experiences with the LSD trials. Fong studied this and many other examples of the effects and insights about LSD in order to create an accurate feel of the drug for her title sequences. 

                   

Here is a little more about Karin Fong (creative director on Magic Trip)...

                   

Animated Documentaries

I recently came across a website with animated shorts that were made by the Rauch brothers in memory of those that lost their lives in the September 11th attacks. The individual stories told through the shorts really touched me, but I was also surprised at how well I was able to focus on the storyteller's voice and really hear what they were saying due to the visuals being animated. I believe this is due to how caught up a viewer can get with a really surprising/emotional visual element and that can sometimes take away from what is being said or why the story is being told. With animation, the visual can enhance the audio by putting a picture to the story, but doesn't allow the viewer to get too distracted from the audio because the animation isn't real. With the first short in particular, the sadness in the woman's voice is clear, but the viewer isn't watching her cry or go through the motions of that particular day in her life so it is easier to focus on her voice because the animation is easily accepted as simply a representation of her story.

There really is something to the idea of creating a world simply to express someone's story, though the idea of animated documentaries is highly criticized because it tests the limits of reality (due to the unlimited possibilities animation brings to the table) and people are less likely to spend money on a documentary that viewers might not believe to be real or true. Orly Yadin discusses why he believes animation was the right choice for his documentary on the holocaust entitled, Silence.

The Rauch brothers are also passionate about the art of animated documentaries and discuss their work below

Watch the full episode. See more POV.