03/05/2020
This year, I was in my first time having chances to touch and study animated documentary from an academical angle. Before that, I personally thought about animated documentary as an unambiguous category of animation that I could seldom recognise because I did have seen many documentaries combining digital skills and animated drawings in some lens segments, but incapably considered as animated documentaries. Yet as a developing documentary form from last late century, animated documentary is still hard to be defined via a clear line from conventional documentary and animation featured film. Fortunately, many directors attempt it as a new access to their recent documentary films, and I could choose one of them as my core study case——Chris the Swiss(2018), an experimental documentary made by female animator Anja Kofmel.
In the beginning of my researching, I met an initial problem about the language in this film due to its co-producing process between Switzerland, Croatia, Germany and Finland, and many interviewees are Swiss as Chris himself. So there are totally two main languages in this film: English and Swiss which occupies most important interview and live-action parts. As I am not familiar with Swiss, I had to surmise actual contents only through the shots. Later, I chose to find more details from others’ online articles of film reviewing, and fortunately, this strategy worked very well in the understanding process.
During the researching process, I personally considered Chris the Swiss more as a hybrid experimental documentary than just pure animated documentary, because the director here drew two main timelines in this film as one is the real-world time shown by live-action and live interviews, and another is the Chris’ historical time re-enacting Chris’ experiences mostly via animation form and little significant archival footages. Unlike other animated documentaries, I found Kofmel only adopts animation access to the depiction of Chris’ unrecorded stories which are also the most heavy and full-of-imagination contents within the film, but chooses live-action in her real investigating process. During the animation parts, she uses a lot symbolic descriptions such as surreal black insects, exaggerating transitions about people and objects like Chris’ striped scarf into black and white lines and a dark shadow around eyes of each terrorists including Chris when he joined the PIV in the film; and some well-designed scenes consisting of a dark room with a huge cross-like window slit and light on the ground, the constant drawings between Kofmel’s dream of a large corn field and Chris’ dying place, and black forest shown after Chris going into a dark side of the war. Here, Kofmel seems to overdraw her personal features and standpoints about her cousin Chris, but still leave a relatively rational depiction of her emotional struggles during the investigating travel by live-action.
At this point, I realised that animated documentary might be easier to express a sense of subjectivity of reality to the audience since animation could be expressed at one point-of-view angle, but still needs to explore more useful approaches to highlight the actual sense of the world we live in, not a world someone might create in front of cameras. From my opinion, I think Kofmel’s live-action parts interspersed among animation sections seems efficient to bring the audience back to the realisation about the sense of authenticity in stories in our world at any time.
Finally, I borrowed a few academic books from university’s library to gain a whole impression of animated documentary, even though there is no more study about this film. It did help me understand animated documentary’s development deeper. And I had at least changed my conclusions about this film twice as I analysed the frames one by one. While I could not contain all my thoughts in my essay due to the words limitation. Perspectively, I think I can do more explorations in the future like attempting to practice my own animated documentary. That will be a fresh experience.