Danish film director Jonas Poher Rasmussen's new film Flee (2021), which describes how an Afghan gay refugee in Denmark faces his past, is an ingenious masterpiece using this medium.
I've heard the idea that animation is the art used to beautify action, crazy deformations, and fantasy scenes, and that any film that doesn't direct the audience's imagination in these directions has some degree of flaw. This statement is even recognized by some people in the animation industry, who believe that animated scenes are actually not as good as real scenes. I've always felt that this is a double standard — how many people criticize E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, 1982) is not a cartoon anymore? This is also a strangely limited perception of the ability of animation to achieve. As more and more movies are showing us, this medium can have many uses.
Let's take Flee (2021) as an example. The documentary tells the story of an Afghan named Amin who fled his homeland in the 1980s because of the national civil war and eventually came to Denmark, where he now lives in the shadow of trauma and secrecy as an open homosexual. All the details of the story are gloomy, nuanced, and focused on his personal experience of real experiences. On paper, it's a current piece of gritty live-action storytelling, but it's become one of the most acclaimed cartoons of the past year. In fact, if it weren't for the animation, the story might not have been told at all.
"Escape" was born out of the friendship between the protagonist Amin and the director Jonas Boch Rasmussen, the latter of which Amin met at school Lee after receiving refugee asylum in Denmark. When Boch Rasmussen became a radio documentary producer, he suggested making a documentary about Amin's personal experiences, a story that the director himself still knows very little about, and Amin isn't ready to tell it. It wasn't until nearly a decade later, when Poch Rasmussen proposed to make the film as an animated documentary, that Amin agreed. Most importantly, the use of animation protects his anonymity very well.
This project is something new for both of them. Boch Rasmussen has directed live-action documentaries (including Searching for Bill (2012) in 2012, which won an award at CPH:DOX [Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival]), but he has never worked in the medium of animation. "I've seen a lot of cartoons before," he told me at the BFI London Film Festival, when "Escape" was screened at BFI Southbank. "I never thought it was something I was going to do myself". The most critical is from ANIDOX[1] ANIDOX:LAB is part of the professional training program of Danish Animation Studios/VIA University College. With the support of Creative Europe MEDIA, in collaboration with the Danish Film Academy, the Swedish Film Academy, Viken ... Continue Reading's Phone, a pioneering creative project in Denmark, has done a lot of work in funding animated documentaries and developing a conceptual framework around emerging genres. Asked to do a roadshow, Pock Rasmussen reimagined animation for the Amin project, which he received early support from ANIDOX.
Pock Rasmussen's preparations focused on his in-depth and detailed conversations with Amin, which are presented as they really are in the film; the voices we hear are their voices. The director called these "interviews," but they were arranged as if they were some sort of therapeutic experience: we saw Amin lying on the bed with his eyes closed, while Pock Rasmussen sat in a chair next to him and asked him questions softly. Over the course of three or four years, the two had 15 to 20 such meetings at the director's home, and Amin gradually revealed his tortuous personal experiences. He would often stop the process and wait until he felt he was ready before moving on to the next part. "When I did my first interview, he said, 'This is going to have some therapeutic effect on me,'" Poch Rasmussen recalls. "That's when I realized, 'The meaning of this project is much more important than I had expected.'" Even though I've known him for so many years, I didn't know at first that he was carrying so much stuff. ”
The setting in the room was not inspired by psychotherapy, but rather based on Pock Rasmussen's own previous experience at radio, where he arranged interviews in the same way. "When you don't have an image, you really need the interviewee to describe what happened. So by having [Amin] lie down, close his eyes, and speak in his present tense, it's really a way for him to relive things, rather than just repeating them. Boch Rasmussen awakens all of Amin's memories of Kabul's plants, houses and colors: he can remember all the visual details.
"Escape" is of course graphic, but since most of the scenes are reproductions of Amin's memories, his descriptions are very valuable reference material for artists, and they also use archival material extensively. These flashbacks form the core of the film's narrative, recounting Amin's escape to Moscow, his first failed attempt to cross Scandinavia, and his eventual arrival in Denmark. Animation has a clear advantage here. The character design ensures continuity between the young Amin and the present; in the dramatic part, there is no sense of discord that arises when watching the actors. Live-action performances, especially those on a low budget, are difficult to stage scenes like the one that crosses a high-class cruise ship in a storm, and it is difficult to portray Afghanistan and Russia in the past so convincingly. In countries where live-action filming proved dangerous, even impossible, realist stories have been told in the form of animation before, as exemplified by Tehran Taboo (2017), which explores the secret underworld of the Iranian capital. Escape also uses silence to create suspense or enhance the lyricism of the shot: for example, a plane traverses a beautiful and free trajectory in the sky. This is not possible in radio programs.
"Escape" is a masterpiece of ingenuity using the medium of animation. The animation itself (directed by Kenneth Ladekjær of the young Danish studio Sun Creature) is finite — the number of original frames per second is relatively small — but, as the story requires, it's natural and extremely insightful. The character designs (designed by Radkgar and Mikkel Sommer [illustrator]) are simple but appealing; they were quite cartoonish in their early development and were later tweaked to be a little more realistic. The designers had to make sure Amin looked like an Afghan, but not revealing his true identity. "We did a lot of research on Afghans and we even Googled 'Afghans',' said Rasmussen. He himself looks different in the film: he is blonde in the film, not the black hair in real life.
The set design, overseen by artistic director Jess Nicholls, roughly distinguishes three types of scenes: a narrative from the past that gives a classic cinematic feel, bold horizontal compositions, and a rich use of light and shadow. Kabul is reproduced in detail. "The artistic director and I spent a lot of time looking for archival material from the time to make sure it felt real in the film. We also showed something to a group of Afghans living in Denmark to make sure their experience was the same. ”
This design contrasts sharply with fragments of the modern period. In the clip showing the latter, we see Amin being interviewed or spending time with his partner Kasper. The scenes were post-processed from real footage shot by Boch Rasmussen and included a simulation of a real-life film shot with a handheld "camera" and shots of jump cuts. The director's team "thought it was funny to have me, the documentary filmmaker, come in and say, 'Just do the jump cut — it's okay.'" They are not used to this at all. We also talked about saying that when you shoot scenes for documentaries, you always shoot something like a leaf. So if you need to edit, you can edit it somewhere else and then go back to what's going on. So we really tried to use the techniques I usually use when I go out to shoot in my animations. ”
Then there are some shots that create a counter-effect. "Escape" opens with the illusion of a group of unrecognizable and simple people running in an empty monochrome landscape. This semi-abstract style is used throughout the film to describe events that Amin did not witness or only vaguely remember. Amin's way of speaking influenced this approach. "When he starts talking about something painful, or something that he has a hard time remembering, you can feel the change in tone in his voice and I think, 'We need to feel that in visual expression as well.'"
Animated documentaries have existed at least since Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) recreates the infamous Sinking of a British cruise ship in World War I. But "Escape," the latest in a recent documentary series, has the opportunity to try to convey the subjective experience of memory and trauma with its ability to distort and subvert the representation of things. The new genre has flourished since the success of the Lebanese war-themed Waltz with Bashir (2008), and Boch Rasmussen sees the former as a major factor influencing his work. Another example is Another Day of Life (2018), adapted from journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's description of Angola's civil war. But Boch Rasmussen feared that his handling of Amin's story might take it out of context, so he also included a large number of archival footage into his films. "Even if you hear the real voice of [Amin], you forget that it's not a fictional story. So [this] is just to remind people that the reason he was kicked out of [Afghanistan] was because of the historical events that actually happened in our world. "These shots also help the budget of the film because they are cheaper than animation production.
So Escape tells us the story in four different visual expressions to reflect the different layers of truth it's trying to reveal: it's both a film about the afghan conflict and a film about a man fleeing conflict who struggles to recall his own experiences and the lasting impact of those experiences on his life — including his identity as a homosexual. This is a striking masterpiece from newcomers to animation. Animation is a medium that theoretically allows you to present anything in any way, but many animation works also indulge in unnecessary dynamic photography because of this free influence. But "Escape" feels very restrained and self-disciplined.
Speaking about the production process, Boch Rasmussen said: "It took me some time to realize that you have to make a lot of different decisions from start to finish. Sometimes, he would question whether the animation was right for him, or whether it was for the story. But he began to value the level of control he had. "You can animate very precisely, specific to what it would be like for him to sit on the couch? You can keep the important things in the picture and cancel the irrelevant ones. I really like the precision of storytelling in the animation. This is difficult in [live-action] documentaries because there are a lot of distractions in reality. "Pre-production of animation usually involves animation: the film's initial form, consisting mainly of storyboards, serves as a detailed blueprint for the final scene and its sequence. Boch Rasmussen involved Amin in this phase, and he "really liked the way he edited before shooting" animation. Pock Rasmussen will continue to use this medium in his next project, the Danish Trilogy, adapted from Halfdan Pisket's graphic novel, which tells the story of Piscot's father's experience in Denmark as a Turkish immigrant.
It took a long time to make the cartoons — the development of Escape began in 2013 — so when they came out, there was rarely a very strong sense of reality. But "Escape" came after last summer's events in Afghanistan and at a time when refugees were re-discussing cross-border issues in Europe. The film has had the opportunity to influence public discussion on these issues, especially in Denmark. Hopefully, it will also leave some imprint on the animation genre as a reminder that this medium not only helps us escape from reality, but also explores it and reveals its depth.
| originally published in the January 2022 issue of Sight and Sound magazine, pp. 56-59
References
| ↑1 | ANIDOX:LAB is part of the Danish Animation Studios/VIA University College Professional Training Program. With the support of Creative Europe MEDIA, in collaboration with the Danish Film Academy, the Swedish Film Academy, Viken Filmsenter, CPH:DOX, Nordisk Panorama and the Documentary Campus, training is provided to creators, directors, producers of documentaries and animation films, as well as professionals who are developing animated documentary projects. |
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British film journalist and curator, associate editor of animation news site Cartoon Brew, and author of the BFI classic series Grave of the Fireflies.
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