“We are still embarrassed” – Weekend – Kommersant

Shows of the Big Cartoon Festival continue in Moscow. This year, almost all festival programs feature films made using the documentary animation method. On why filmmakers around the world are increasingly choosing animation to talk about reality, and why animadoc is the strongest language for reporting trauma and disaster, Konstantin Shavlovsky said the program director of the Big Animation Festival and the curator of the School of Documentary Animation of the Rudnik festival Dina Goder.

How and why did the method of documentary animation become perhaps the most popular in the world?

I think this is part of a more general global trend related to the demand for reality, which is responding not only to documentary literature and cinema, but also to documentary theater and pre-animation. Moreover, with the help of animation, you can show that part of reality that no one else simply reaches. She has several advantages. Firstly, it can show what is happening inside a person, what he sees and what he thinks about. Secondly, it works great when, for some reason, the director needs to hide the identities of his characters. For example, in stories about violence and in general about physicality, because people talk about it quite hard. There are, say, a few animadocs about the sex of older people – it turns out that a lot of people want to talk about it, but are not ready to do it with an open face. Animadoc provides an opportunity for a frank conversation on the most complex and painful topics. The same applies to films about the problems of sexuality, about the difficulties of socializing people with disabilities or mental disabilities. Animation makes it easier for us to understand people who are not like us, it has its own tools for this.

Can we say that do-animation works here better than the same documentary?

In any case, she can very reliably show us the world through the eyes of another. Talk about how a person with bipolar disorder, or with clinical depression, or with an autism spectrum disorder, views the world. This happens, among other things, because many directors talk about themselves and their problems. For example, this year we had a short film by Nadia Shcherbakova at the School of Documentary Animation in Sviyazhsk, shot from the point of view of a person who stutters. It would seem that all of us have all seen people with stuttering, but I only learned from her film that we all, it turns out, when confronted with a stuttering person, begin to behave in exactly the same way as it is not necessary to behave.

Is it possible to say that this is why documentary animation is very often used to tell about the ultimate experience of a person, about his encounter with violence, war, catastrophe?

Actually, this, probably, in many respects, began the popularity of pre-animation, when in 2008 it thundered “Waltz with Bashir” Ari Folman on massacres in refugee camps. It turned out that this form can be in demand, that people around the world are ready to watch such films in cinemas. Then, very often, pre-animation works with plots and events from which there are no documents left, except for oral evidence. This year we have in the BFM competition one of the most, in my opinion, powerful films-evidence of the Holocaust – a film by Israeli director Tal Kantor “Letter to a Pig”. She recalls an episode from her school life, when an old man who survived the Holocaust came to them for a lesson about the war. Just as veterans still come to Russian schools for war lessons, survivors come to schoolchildren in Israel. And this old man told a rather terrible story about how, as a boy, he ran away from the Nazis and ran into a barn, and the pigs covered him with themselves, and then he lived in this barn for several months. In his documentary story, she weaves her childhood perception of this story. It shows how schoolchildren are not interested in either this man or his story, and how, at the same time, the trauma he talks about still cannot let go of Israeli society. It repels reality, but at the same time goes almost into phantasmagoria, and this transition turns out to be very organic. And probably, when talking about the Catastrophe, do-animation has this advantage: it can include any fantasies, while remaining a document. In the same “Waltz with Bashir” there were absolutely fantastic scenes – for example, a giant mermaid who carried the hero in her arms. But he shows us what was really going on in his head – his hallucinatory state, his fear and his stupor.

What do the technical possibilities of animation add to a documentary story?

I very often cite as an example the film “Beyond the Fence” by Masha Kogan-Lerner, based on a real diary of a patient in a neuropsychiatric boarding school. Masha made it out of metal wire, and we, as spectators, can feel this lock-up of the heroine in the boarding school almost at a tactile level, because it is connected with barbed wire, and at the same time feel the effort with which this wire bends. Or, for example, many animators work with felt puppets. And not just with felt dolls, but literally “grow” the whole world, so that all the scenery becomes so soft, warm, felt. Like in the beautiful movie “This Delicious Pie!” Emma De Swaf and Mark James Rules about the history of the Belgian African colonies, where the dolls were cute and soft, and what the hell happened to them. If all the same was filmed in a feature film, it would probably be dark and bloody – and perhaps we would not want to watch it.

That is, do-animation allows you to start a conversation about what is difficult or even impossible to talk about otherwise?

Yes, and then, it is easier to connect to animation. I remember there was such a cartoon film “I Love Girls” by Canadian director and comics artist Diane Obomsavin, where all the heroines had human bodies and animal heads. And when they asked her why it was impossible to draw just girls, she answered: “Well, everyone loves bunnies.” Animation very often becomes the ideal entry point for talking about something that society is not ready to accept.

Previously, films based on real events or recorded interviews were not called documentary animation. Why are they singled out now?

Because at some point there were a lot of them. There were more and more of them in the 1990s, and at the end of the 2000s, after the release of Waltz with Bashir, there was just a collapse. And it became clear that this phenomenon already needs some kind of discursive framework.

Was there documentary animation in the USSR?

If we count popular science films, informational videos, promotional products and so on, then yes, of course. At least even in Vertov’s “Anniversary of the Revolution” on the credits we see an animated map of the Czechoslovak front – and this is also a documentary animation. And recently, Oksana Cherkasova approached me and said that her films, shot at the turn of the 2000s, “Your Pushkin”, built on myths and rumors around Pushkin, and “Man from the Moon” (Grand Prix of the animation festival in Leipzig) about Miklukho- Maclay, it can be attributed to the animadoc. Both of them were based on real documents, drawings, diaries of that time and other historical materials. There are no rigid boundaries here – as in all contemporary art, everything floats.

And why don’t the classics of Russian animation work with an animado? Are they not interested in reality?

I think they process it differently. One cannot say about the “Tale of Tales” that Norshtein is not interested in reality there. When he starts talking about this movie, he immediately shows photos of his aunt who is feeding the baby, and in all his exhibitions there is a huge amount of documentary material that is behind the “Tale of Fairy Tales”, and the house from which Volchok comes out is his house . So there are elements of documentation. But, of course, animados in the sense in which we are talking about it now are filmed by young authors. Probably because they feel and understand better what it is.

This summer, another School of Documentary Animation took place at the Rudnik festival. Thematically, this year’s applications were somehow different from previous years’ applications?

To be honest, when we were waiting for these applications, we thought that among them there would be many stories related to the situation in the country. But they were almost gone. Instead, we received a lot of stories about personal trauma, about violence. In general, I noticed that very often in dokanimation, when a topic is taken, it is a metaphor for something else. For example, in a certain year there were several films about the problems of teenagers suffering from skin diseases. And from these films it was immediately obvious that they were not about the skin, but about parental overprotection. About a mother who has been shaking over him all her life, because he needs to be lubricated, treated all the time, and this man, who is now 20 years old, finds himself bound hand and foot, and every second mom wants to know where he is and what he is does. And in the same way – indirectly – the films shot at the “Mine” this year reflect the anxiety, confusion and fear that are spilled into society.

Is there any trend regarding themes and stories this year?

If earlier we noticed many films dedicated to grandparents, the desire of the authors to keep them, to preserve the memory of them in this way, now it’s time for dads and moms. I even put together a collection of do-animations for the Big Animation Festival, which is called “My Dad, My Mom”, because there are a lot of films in which children talk about their parents and even make claims to them. About my mother mostly: I missed, my mother worked, my mother was leaving. And about dad: you didn’t love me much, you left us, where are you? And there is one film that, it seems to me, is especially important to watch in Russia now: this is Anna Tayl’s autobiographical work “Silence”. Taille tells how, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she found out that her father worked for the Stasi, and this was a terrible collapse of her world.

As always, there are a lot of films related to the rejection of taboos. This is all from the “I’m not afraid to say” series, and this trend for openness, for saying what was not customary to talk about before, has a very strong female voice. Including because now all over the world there are a lot of animated film directors. If 20 years ago it was mainly guys who studied animation, now they are all girls. And girls want to talk about what worries them, and therefore there are so many films about women’s rights, women’s physicality. We have a thematic program “Only for Women!”, where the most powerful movie, in my opinion, is the Slovenian “Grandma’s Sexual Life”, directed by Urška Djukic and Emily Pidjar. The film is based on a book of Slovene stories about their sex life in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, there are many women from the villages, but the country is poor, and the texts themselves are terrible! And all this is illustrated in such a deliberately rude, almost childish drawing. Girls work with the trauma of previous generations, especially since, as we see, conservative public opinion has not gone anywhere. And of course, there are a lot of stories of emigration, refugees, displaced people now, because the whole world has moved. I think next year such stories will inevitably appear in our country. Already appearing.

What other topics do you think are relevant and will be relevant for Russian do-animation?

Russian documentary animation is a relatively recent phenomenon, and of course we are late. For example, films about physicality are only just beginning to appear in our country, ours are still far from the frankness of Polish or Canadian authors. We are still shy. But if we talk about the future, then in the news feed we have one and only topic with which Russian directors, if they are only interested in reality, will have to work for a long time. Now they just can’t find the language to describe it. But these films will definitely appear.

“Grandma’s Sex Life” Cinema “Illusion”, November 3, 22.15; cinema “Karo 11 October”, November 5, 20.00

Full schedule – on the site festival

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