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)