Hidden Figures
There is a rich history of animated films drawing on the medium’s unique healing power when it comes to processing trauma and healing from its pain. A number of animators including Jim Trainor, Helen Hill and Run Wrake all paved the way for Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Flee – Chris Childs takes us back through these traditions.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee paints a tender portrait of a life spent seeking asylum from an often hostile world. We follow the life of Amin, an Afghan man now living in Copenhagen who remembers his childhood as a young refugee, a story as much about the youthful discoveries of music and sexuality as it is the oppressive forces he encounters.
Animation gives Amin the comfort of telling his story without the ordeal of looking down a camera lens, talking instead through audio interviews. Yet the film’s use of animation also grants the audience a rare sense of detail into Amin’s past, immersing us in recreations of his life’s many chapters. Traumatic encounters with police and terrifying border crossings are retold through expressive drawn sequences which never lose sight of the reality they emerge from.
The medium of animation is well placed to depict unthinkable things. It can allow a degree of separation from reality through artificial images, with animators using this detachment from photographic images to delve into the real world. Taking full advantage of this irony is Chicago-based animator Jim Trainor, who for over 20 years has used his films to tease out the darker sides of drawn images.
Trainor’s early work explores the cruelty of the animal kingdom, namely in a trilogy of short films in which animated creatures explain the brutal behaviours necessary to survive in the world, such as 2001’s The Bats. His most recent work shifted focus towards humankind and the ritualistic practises of ancient cultures, most notably in his 2008 short film The Presentation Theme.
Trainor explores the childhood memories of a prisoner of war in the Peruvian Moche civilisation, exploring the trauma of growing up in captivity. The prisoner’s memories are uncertain, only shown in their full scope towards the film’s conclusion and revealing an upsetting turn of events. The simplicity of Trainor’s characters, drawn with basic lines and shapes, leave the viewer unprepared for the unkindness of the historical traumas he depicts.
Using ancient history as a basis for animation can allow filmmakers to take a comfortable distance from the upsetting aspects of their source material. Introducing personal friends and relationships into filmmaking can produce the opposite effect, the artist’s closeness to their subject creating an uneasy situation. The final film of Nova-Scotia animator Helen Hill has this uncanny quality, since its co-director, Hill’s partner Paul Gailiunas, finished the film following Hill’s sudden murder in 2007. The abrupt death of Hill creates a painful absence at the centre of The Florestine Collection, an animated documentary released in 2011 which uses clips from her unfinished short film as well as home movies of the director.
Hill had found a discarded box of dresses on a roadside in New Orleans, deciding then to track down the maker of the garments and record conversations with people who knew her. Despite her project being cut short, the film uses her tragic passing as an opportunity to transform and expand Hill’s original concept. Gailiunas creates parallels between his partner’s work and the unknown dressmaker she was documenting – two artists whose work has delicacy and determination in the face of oppressive forces. The resulting film stands up as a fascinating testament to creativity in the face of loss.
Like Helen Hill, the career of UK animator Run Wrake was tragically cut short. His films could be surreal and abstract, such as 1994’s Jukebox and Anyway from 1990, and despite often working in commercial animation Wrake tended to criticise capitalism in his personal short films, most strikingly in 2005’s Rabbit. Wrake was diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and decided to use one of his final works to explore the feelings surrounding his declining health. He had been collaborating with artist Howie B on music videos for over 20 years, complementing the musician’s work with his striking visuals. 2014’s Down With the Dawn marked their final project together, an eight-minute piece that follows a cancer cell floating through space as it expands and mutates, eventually covering the screen in darkness. A year later, Wrake passed away.
Despite being dwarfed by Wrake’s more celebrated films, Down with the Dawn is a poignant example of an animator using the medium to consider their own mortality, having been created with an awareness of likely being the director’s final project. The film uses fragments and references to his previous films to create a piece that acts as a final statement on his body of work. The video’s morphing cell moves through diagrams of the night sky, each star labelled with scientific notes that resemble the floating words which filled the screen in Rabbit, while the high-rise tower blocks towards the end of the piece resemble the packed cityscapes of Jukebox. These points of reference create a sombre conclusion to Wrake’s filmography, and a moving exploration by an artist approaching their end.
The surreal tendencies of Wrake’s animations are shared by Jenny Jokela, the Finnish animator who paired dream-like images with themes of trauma in her award-winning 2018 graduation film Barbeque. Jokela’s hand-painted short follows human figures as they move through a strange landscape filled with threatening creatures and misshapen bodies. The director has spoken openly of her aim of making a study of post-traumatic stress, exploring the many symptoms and lingering effects through experimental animation.
Jokela’s nightmarish vision of writhing bodies in hostile surroundings is uncompromising in its attempt to impart mental distress onto its audience. There are suggestions of hope in the film’s final moment, an impressive wide shot revealing the characters stuck in an infinitely looping cycle. In the frame’s corner are two figures walking slowly away from their hellish surroundings towards an idyllic bay in the distance. A possibility of escape, perhaps?
The influences of Jokela’s short film draw from foundational figures from underground animation, such as Georges Schwizgebel, master of looping sequences, and Suzan Pitt, the recently deceased director of 2007’s Asparagus and Joy Street from 2013. Pitt’s mark can be felt in most animated shorts exploring the workings of the mind, particularly those braving the task of showing its darker corners, as in the case in Barbeque.
Through these various attempts to depict the effect of trauma on our minds, a line of influence can be traced from Flee to a longstanding tradition within animated film. This tradition includes multiple artistic approaches and visual styles, from straight-forward realism to the edges of surrealist cinema.
Flee celebrates an art form too often confined to the realms of children’s entertainment. The medium offers potential to show realities often too painful to acknowledge. It makes seen, through animated movement, experiences that have long been hidden.
Flee is out in UK cinemas now.
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