Bella Honess Roe teaches Film Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. She has published extensively on the animated documentary. Current interests include the relationship between animation, imagination and knowledge in the popular visual culture of things that physically exist but are invisible to the human eye.
A post by Bella Honess Roe
Suppose that you are a filmmaker who wants to make a non-fiction film or documentary about what it is like to have a particular mental health or neurological condition. Bipolar disorder, for example, or audio-visual synasthaesia. There are various approaches available to you. You could film interviews with participants who have first-person experience of those conditions. You could present various statistics and other factual information about the prevalence of these conditions and their symptoms. Another approach might be to get participants (or actors) to re-enact typical or witnessed scenes of living with bipolar disorder or synasthaesia. These are all relatively standard, conventional we might say, documentary approaches. An alternative approach that has, since about the late-1990s, become increasingly popular for making non-fiction films about such topics is to use animation (Honess Roe 2013). In these films, known as animated documentaries, the ‘world in here’ of subjective experience, is represented via animation. In fact, rather than the type of things that are physically visible, such as events that could be witnessed by others, or the ‘world out there’ that is typically represented in conventional, live-action documentaries, animation has been shown to lend itself incredibly well to conveying realities that are subjective and internal. Previously, I have described these types of animated documentaries, ones that convey subjective states of mind, as ‘evocative’. These are films that respond to the representational limitation that ‘[c]ertain concepts, emotions, feelings and states of mind are particularly hard to represent through live-action imagery.’ (Honess Roe 2013, 25)
Central to understanding evocative animated documentaries as documentaries is my claim that they enable us to learn about an unfamiliar state of mind or mental experience. In other words, they are of a type of film that enable us to gain knowledge about the world, as opposed to a world of fiction, fantasy or make-believe. And, furthermore, that this type of film allows us to know something about subjective experiences that might be wholly unfamiliar to us. They do this through prompting our imagination in a different way to how imaginative engagement with films is typically understood. While most philosophers and cognitive film theorists agree that imagination is involved in some way when we watch films, there is extensive debate around how imagination works in this regard. However, the primary focus has been on imagination’s role in spectators’ empathy with film characters (e.g. Smith 1997) - the main assertion that to be engaged with a film involves feeling empathy or being able to imagine oneself in the emotional and psychological shoes of the film’s characters. It is my contention, however, that ‘evocative’ animated documentaries that are particularly good at giving us insight into unfamiliar subjective experiences do so by eliciting a primarily epistemological, rather than emotional (i.e. empathetic) response from the viewer.
Animated Minds is a collection of series of short films. The first and second series, released in 2003 and 2009, dealt with issues of mental health. Subsequent series were about postnatal depression, war veterans’ post-traumatic stress disorder and the experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers.[1] All the series combine animated visuals with first-person spoken testimony in which the documentary participants recount their personal experience. In this way, each film offers insight into a particular mental health issue or psychological experience. In The Lightbulb Thing, a film from the first Animated Minds series, the narrator shares her personal experience of bipolar disorder. While she recounts specific memories, such as how cutting her fingernails represented the stultifying repetition of life after hospital, or the university essay assignment that first spiralled her into crisis, we come to know virtually nothing about her as an individual. Her name is only revealed in the closing credits, and we are not provided any information about her life beyond the recounted experience of bipolar disorder. This approach is typical of the Animated Minds films which, despite their professed intention to give audiences insight into their documentary subjects’ subjective experiences, experiences that are quite likely unfamiliar to most viewers, do not do so by providing a route in via empathy. The documentary subjects are not ‘thoroughly characterised’ in the way Jan Nåls (2018, 140) has suggested is required to evoke audience empathy, where characterisation includes ‘particularity, interiority, roundness, development and motive.’ Indeed, we might argue that the subjects in Animated Minds are not characters at all. Instead, they are ‘flat, prototypical’ (Nåls 2018, 140) formulations. This, in fact, was intentional. Director Andy Glynne stated that they did not want the films to be about ‘a particular individual’, but rather be about the condition (Glynne 2013, 75).
If the films are not seeking to engage us on an emotional level by providing individual documentary subjects or characters with whom we can empathise, and therefore imagine ourselves in their shoes, if we are not being invited to imagine ‘from the inside’ (Eder 2016, 87), how is it that the films might claim to be successful in conveying their respective subjective experiences? That they are successful in achieving their desired aims has been recorded - for example the patient who expressed relief at finally overcoming the frustration of ‘trying to explain to my consultant [psychiatrist] ... what it feels like to live and experience’ her mental health condition by being able to show him her film (Glynne 2013, 75). This insight, however, is not of the order of factual knowledge or knowledge of a specific incident experienced by the films’ subjects. No such specific information is given in the films. Rather, the films enable us to know what it is like, rather than feel what it is like, to experience the mental health issue or psychological state being described. This engagement with the films is still one facilitated by the imagination. However, rather than the type imaginative engagement with film that dominates the cognitive film theory discourse – character empathy –these films prompt imagination that facilitates knowledge rather than affect.
The type of imagination at work here is its ‘instructive use’ where it ‘enables us to learn about the world as it is, as when we plan or make decisions’ (Kind and Kung 2016, 1). Williamson (2016, 113) argues that the stereotypical philosophical contrast between imagining and knowing is ‘utterly misleading.’ However, this stereotype indicates one of the quandaries about imagination as posed by Kind and Kung (2016, 1): ‘how can the same mental activity that allows us to fly completely free of reality also teach us something about it?’. One resolution to this quandary comes in the form of constraints placed on our imagination:
When there are constraints on imagination, either architectural constraints or constraints that we can willingly impose, and when these constraints ground imagination in the real world in the right way, imagination can help us discover truths about the real world. (Kind and Kung 2016, 2, emphasis in original).
Even those sceptical of the potential for knowledge acquisition through imagination, such as Heidi L Maibom (2016, 192n.6), acknowledge the potential for ‘scaffolding’ to overcome their asserted limitations, because ‘knowing what to imagine ... is central to getting the right results from imagining’. (See Kind 2020 for a discussion of imaginative scaffolding.)
My proposal is that evocative animated documentaries like Animated Minds provide ‘scaffolding’ that enable us to imagine what it is like to have certain mental health issues or psychological experiences. They are not, for all the reasons discussed, inviting us to empathise with the documentary subjects by imagining their perspective ‘from the inside’ or simulating their emotions. Instead, they are prompting us to imagine as ‘recreative perspective-taking that takes up the distinctive first-personal phenomenal character of experience, and that justifies us in beliefs about possibilities’ (Balcerak Jackson 2016, 54). It is because they work in this way – allowing us to imagine what it is like to be in a mental state that we have not experienced ourselves – that these films function effectively as animated documentaries about the ‘world in here’ of subjective experience. Furthermore, it is why these films are illustrative of animation’s potential to expand the epistemological range and depth of documentary more broadly.
[1] More details of each series can be found at https://www.animatedminds.com/watch-the-series
References
Balcerak Jackson, Magdalena. 2016. “On the Epistemic Value of Imagining, Supposing, and Conceiving.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 41-60. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Eder, Jens. 2016. “Films and Existential Feelings.” Projections 10 (2): 75-103
Glynne, Andy. 2013. “Drawn From Life: The Animated Documentary.” In The Documentary Film Book, edited by Brian Winston, 73-82. London: British Film Institute.
Honess Roe, Annabelle. 2013. Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Kind, Amy. 2020. “What Imagination Teaches.” In Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change, edited by Enoch Lambert and John Schwenkler, 133-146. Oxford University Press.
Kind, Amy and Peter Kung. 2016. “Introduction: The Puzzle of Imaginative Use.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 1-37. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Maibom, Heidi L. 2016. “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Failure to Forecast and the Empathic Imagination.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 185-206. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Nåls, Jan. 2018. “The Difficulty of Eliciting Empathy in Documentary.” In Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film, edited by Catalin Brylla and Mette Kramer, 135-148. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Smith, Murray. 1997. “Imagining from the Inside.” In Film Theory and Philosophy edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 412-430. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Williamson, Timothy. 2016. “Knowing by Imagination.” In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 113-123. Oxford: Oxford University Press