Animating with Facts: The Performative Process of Documentary Animation in the ten mark (2010)

Introduction

This essay is concerned with how animation – and animated performance in particular – functions in nonfiction films, films based on fact. I begin by briefly clarifying the term ‘animated documentary’, before moving on to the main focus of the article, the act of animating, the performative nature of animating, in the context of films that are based on real world stories and self-consciously engage with their factual basis. My particular focus will be on a film recently produced at the Arts University College Bournemouth, by stop motion animator Joe Sheehan. Entitled the ten mark, this short film explores stillness, mood and atmosphere; the peculiarities of the stop motion technique telling a story that is nonfictional and based on rigorous and detailed research into actual events. I will say more about the film later, and elaborate on the ways in which it can be said to be ‘nonfictional’ or ‘documentary’, but it is important to note at this stage that my argument is built on an assumption that stop motion animated films problematize notions of performance and performativity and require a specific form of attention and belief from the viewer. My choice of the ten mark as the focal point for discussion may seem perverse, as the film appears to be far from a straightforward ‘animated documentary’, but it is precisely its perversity in this regard that makes it ideal: I will use it as a route into what I see as some key conceptual issues.

Nonfictional films represent real events and real people, and generally do so by representing those events and people via live action, where the filmed record acts as an indexical ‘trace’ of what occurred before the camera. Although we may understand as viewers that the footage has undergone some editing, addition of voiceover or other ‘creative treatment’, there is an indexical connection between the events/people and their filmed depiction. In animation, this indexical connection is problematized: what we see enacted on the screen is not what passed before the camera; it is not, simply, a record of a set of real events and people. But, in the specific case of stop motion/puppet animation, nor is it simply a construction that has no connection to an anterior, existent reality. The puppets, sets and objects in stop motion animation have a real world existence that marks them out, ontologically, as different to other types of animation, such as those using drawings or computer graphics. My contention will be that this also means that the animator and the viewer engage with the objects/puppets and the animation in a very specific way that foregrounds performance. The process of ‘performing’ stop motion animation – and the ways it intersects with representations of real/factual material – will therefore be examined in the light of debates about the ‘performative’ in documentary more generally. Noel Carroll’s (2003) concept of ‘presumptive assertion’ and Tamar Gendler’s (2008) concept of ‘alief’ will be used to suggest how viewers negotiate their relationship with this complex field of cultural production.

Before moving on to examine notions of performance and engagement in more detail, however, we need to outline what ‘animated documentary’ is in general terms and how it relates to more conventionally understood documentary.

Animated documentary: challenging indexicality and realigning audience engagement

Although the putative field of ‘animated documentary’ has arguably existed since animation and documentary have been recognized as categories – as early as Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), for example – it is certainly the case that sustained critical and theoretical interest in the field has developed only very recently, particularly over the past 10 to 15 years. This special issue is evidence of this growing interest, along with other published work (see DelGaudio, 1997; Strom, 2003; Ward, 2005, 2006; Wells, 1997) and some important as yet unpublished research (see Honess Roe, 2009, along with her contribution to this issue). At the heart of all of this research is an attempt to map what happens when two (apparently) opposed ‘registers’ meet. In the case of DelGaudio’s article, for instance, the title asks ‘If truth be told, can ‘toons tell it?’, and there is a tension between, on the one hand, the notion of documentary as an indexical, ‘objective’ (albeit often rhetorically structured) record of an anterior reality and, on the other hand, animation as a frame-by-frame artistic in(ter)vention, which often seems to deliberately fly in the face of the real world and the people in it. Documentary is associated with truth, representations of the real; animation is associated with flights of fancy and the imagination: how can these two ever be reconciled?

Debates about the objectivity, veracity and transparency of live action documentary are important and, for some, primarily based on the photographic basis of the form. Gregory Currie (2006: 141), for example, has made the case for a definition of ‘documentary’ as consisting of what he calls ‘visible traces’, where the primary feature of documentary is photographic traces of people, objects or events. However – and this is key to distinguishing documentary from fictional films which, after all, can also consist of photographic traces – photographs or film images can function in two distinct ways:

[The photographic trace] represents in virtue of being a photograph, and in thus representing, it represents the things and events of which it is a trace. But a photograph can also have another representing role: a role imposed on it by its association with some narrative … It is a condition on a film being documentary that its constitutive images have only that first, causally induced, representing role. (p. 145, emphasis in original)

Currie makes a distinction between photographs as traces and paintings (and, by extension, other forms such as drawn and puppet animation) as testimony. In other words, ‘a camera records what is in front of it, and not what the photographer thinks is in front of it, if there is a difference between them. But the painter paints what he or she thinks is there’ (p. 142). The use of the term ‘testimony’ here is therefore very precisely referring not only to the depicted content of the image but also to the way in which a created image such as a painting ‘testifies’ to the creative process that went into its making. For Currie, it is not equivalent to a simple record or document of what passed before a camera’s lens; it is a construction involving choices and intentionality on the part of the creator. We might more accurately say, then, that this definition of the term ‘testimony’ pinpoints the ‘dialogue’ between the thing represented, the intentions of the person creating the representation, the particular characteristics of the medium in which he or she is creating the representation, and the interpretation(s) of those viewing it. This distinction between traces and testimony is one that usefully links to an important point I shall return to presently: that animated films can be said to be documentaries, even though they contain no ‘traces’ in the sense Currie contends.

Clearly – and this is where I would strongly disagree with Currie – it is as possible (and arguably effective) to represent a ‘fact’, an actual occurrence or experience, in animated form as it is in live action form. (Indeed, in some instructional films, using animation is arguably clearer than live action.) But there are certain connotations that mean that animated films are often more likely to be seen as speculative, or linked to dreams, fantasies and so on – and it is certainly the case that a good many animated documentaries work in this field and play on those connotations. For example, Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) operates within the interstitial space between memory, trauma, dreams and real historical events; Andy Glynne’s series of short films made for television, Animated Minds (2003–2009), uses animated imagery to explore the thoughts and feelings of people with mental illness; Samantha Moore’s film An Eyeful of Sound (2010) ‘documents’ the apperception of people with synaesthesia through highly inventive sound and image design. What all these examples have in common is that animation is used as a way of representing real things – emotions, memories, ‘ways of seeing’ – that are not readily visible.

However, in the majority of documentaries, the indexical link between real events and live action footage of those events means that there is a strong ‘realist’ connection between them that animated representations simply will not have. If you have live action footage of someone doing something, this represents a more conventionally understood ‘documentary-like’ notion of that action than a ‘second-order’ representation such as drawn, or computer, or puppet animation of ostensibly the ‘same’ action or event. (This is, in effect, a rephrasing of Currie’s ‘trace’/’testimony’ distinction.) Animated representations of real world events and people have an immediate and inbuilt scepticism because we cannot take them simply at face value: the ontological status of the images often contrasts with the indexicality of the sound (in those films that use real interviews as a basis), or the heightened artificiality of the surface of the images emphasizes the contingency and constructedness of what we are looking at. There is then a spectrum where we can place and understand how different types of documentary function vis-à-vis the real events and people they purport to represent. The field of drama-documentary, for example, including re-enactments, reconstructions and so forth exists in a different relation to the real world and real events – and involves some level of performance by actors – than other kinds of documentary. An animated version of a scene is, in some respects, merely another kind of reconstruction, but one that arguably draws more direct and specific attention to itself as a reconstruction.

Annette Hill (2008: 217) has usefully examined documentary’s ‘multiple modes of engagement’ and emphasized that viewers will respond to documentary material in a wide variety of ways. She notes: ‘Viewers have to be fast on their feet if they are to respond to the changing nature of documentary.’ This highlights an important point in relation to the present discussion: that viewers play a role in determining when something is defined (and agreed) as a documentary or a variant of documentary. Of course, this does not mean that an audience member can simply declare something to be ‘a documentary’. Such labelling needs to be conventionally understood (i.e. socially agreed, for example via popular or critical discourses) and the ‘lineage’ of the example in question needs to be traceable to debates about documentary signification. Hill’s discussion makes use of John Corner’s distinction between ‘looking at’ and ‘looking through’, where the latter

involves a reflexive mode of engagement. It is observation of ourselves experiencing something; through second-order observation we can transform the experience, taking it to an ‘imaginary space’ without losing touch with what is real about the experience to begin with. (Hill, 2008: 225)

In addition to really interesting work that synthesizes documentary with musicals (the work of Brian Hill, for example), ¹ memoirs (Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, 2003, constructed from home movies, answerphone messages, family photographs), studies of emotional states such as trauma and other things that work at the edges of performativity, animation has proved to be one of the more intriguing areas of inquiry and practice relating to nonfictional and factual material, giving privileged access to this ‘imaginary space’. This places questions of performance and performativity at the centre of the discussion, and it is to this subject that we now turn.

Performance and the performative in stop motion/puppet documentary

Stella Bruzzi (2000: 153) has summarized some of the problems of ‘performance’ and the ‘performative’ in relation to live action documentary. In realist drama–documentary, the actors’ performances serve the purpose of ‘authenticat[ing] the fictionalisation’. The performative documentary, on the other hand,

uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation. The performative element within the framework of non-fiction is thereby an alienating, distancing device, not one which actively promotes identification and a straightforward response to a film’s content. (pp. 153–154)

I have written elsewhere (Ward, 2008) about the performative mode and the ethical dilemmas raised by performance in drama–documentary. Central to certain forms of documentary is the notion of what Bill Nichols (1994: 72) refers to as the ‘virtual performance’, which is predicated on being ‘unscripted and unrehearsed’ – or at least giving that appearance – for its authenticity and claim on the real.

With animation, of course, the complete opposite appears to be true. Documentary animation is built on a highly reflexive performativity that foregrounds process and construction; furthermore, this is the logical conclusion of what Bruzzi refers to as ‘the performative element’ in the sense that it thereby foregrounds alienation and distance. The viewer’s position whilst watching an animated film that purports to be about real events and real people is an odd and ambivalent one, precisely because the viewer knows that the real person is being re-presented through a completely fabricated, frame-by-frame construction. Such oddness and ambivalence is, I would suggest, accentuated by the peculiarities of stop motion. As Suzanne Buchan (2006: 33) has observed:

Puppet animation does represent an image of spatial and object relations that are possible to experience in two contexts. The object can be both haptically experienced in cinema and physically accessed in the ‘real’ world. Although the movements of the puppet are limited to the screening experience, the spaces and the sets that the puppets are filmed in, and are not animated, do retain a direct relation to our own lived experience

In a different (but related) context, puppet scholar John Bell (2008: 148) says of shadow theatre (and by extension all re-presentations of performances by puppets, including those in film, television and other media):

[It] inevitably invites complex philosophical questions because it involves watching not the object itself, but an image that results from the combination of object and the light waves that pass it and hit the shadow screen. In other words, shadow theatre marks a double presence, of two performing object systems: the puppets themselves and the screen upon which the images are projected. Likewise, film and television methods join two performance systems: the live performance taking place in a studio or on location, and the images of that performance projected quite a distance away (and probably at a later time) on a screen

Buchan’s ‘two contexts’ and Bell’s ‘double presence’ are at the heart of what I would like to explore in more detail: the ways in which animation that deals in documentary-related images problematizes the notion of performance. As already noted earlier, instead of a set of actions and locations ‘played out’ and recorded, unscripted and unrehearsed, everything in the animated documentary has to be created, crafted and deployed – even the movement itself is manufactured. As Bell’s comment makes clear, moreover, once we are in the realm of ‘puppetry’ – or any signifying system where one thing clearly and obviously ‘stands in for’ another – it becomes all the more apparent that we are dealing with what he calls ‘performing object systems’ and not a simple, transparent recording or documenting of some anterior reality. The crux of the matter is how self-consciously reflexive the puppet form is: it is clear enough, for instance, that Buchan’s criteria of two contexts (that something can be haptically experienced in cinema and accessed in the real world) could easily be applied to all manner of run-of-the-mill live action documentaries and actuality footage (‘here is the Eiffel Tower in a documentary about Paris; here I am atop the actual Eiffel Tower’; the haptic experience and direct access apply here). Similarly, one could argue (as many have) that live action films of all kinds are ‘signifying systems’ and more often than not involve one thing (an actor) standing in for another thing (a character). It is important to emphasize, however, that we are focusing here on stop motion animation – and that the viewer’s perception of and orientation towards something that they know to be animated will be qualitatively different from other media forms.

Laura Ivins-Hulley (2008) addresses some of these concerns in an interesting article about performance in (fictional) stop motion/puppet animation. She emphasizes the point that the puppet has an existence outside the film whilst its movement (as with all animation) only exists at the point of projection. For Ivins-Hulley, this means that the viewer plays a vital role in co-constituting the performances, precisely because (following Richard Bauman’s thinking) ‘to perform is to perform for someone, someone who recognizes the performance to be such’ (emphasis in original). In an animated film such as the ten mark, or Peter Lord’s Going Equipped (1989) – both films that rely, albeit in different ways, on a direct link to a real person, so that their representational strategies can be interpreted as ‘documentary’ – the viewer’s recognition of the animatedness of the puppet/plasticene figure means that the notion of something being performed ‘for someone’ is displaced onto (or at least shared by) the process of animating. The acting, the performing, the motions are all done by, communicated by, the animator rather than the figure itself as an actor with its own agency. As Ivins-Hulley suggests, there is a further displacement going on, one figured around the ontological status of the images we view, and our understanding of their relationship to reality.

the ten mark: animated documentary?

I would now like to contextualize some of the ideas I have just sketched out in relation to Joe Sheehan’s film entitled the ten mark. ² The film is a stop motion puppet animation film about British serial killer John Christie – whose story is most well known from the film 10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer, 1971), in which Richard Attenborough played Christie. Sheehan’s film takes the form of a series of slow-moving vignettes inside Christie’s house – dark, foreboding, creepy, uncanny. We hear things off-screen (a closing door, coughs, a creaking stair, the trains on the London Underground) but tend not to see anything much. The figure of Christie is often obscured, in the shadows. There is no exposition, dialogue or voiceover ‘explaining’ the enormity of Christie’s crimes, or trying to get ‘inside his head’. How might this animated film ‘work’ as a documentary?

Sheehan’s research procedure for the film was obsessively detailed and factual – many hours of research in archives at Kew, various court records, the newspaper library at Colindale, along with field trips to Ladbroke Grove in West London (the location of Rillington Place until it was demolished in 1970). His construction of sets is likewise painstaking and verging on the obsessive. The ‘facts’ are there in the research and pre-production to this film, but in what way is Sheehan ‘acting’ with them as an animator? Clearly in a very different way to the Attenborough film, or a notional expository ‘true crime’ documentary about Christie that might use reconstructions involving an actor playing the killer. The approach of this stop motion animated film is to explore detail, nuance and atmosphere – the dark and dank interiors, a picture of Christie’s mother on the wall, a tea tray that was found abandoned in the kitchen, and can be seen in police photographs of the house after Christie was arrested; in the film, we see this tray slide ominously to the floor. In many ways, this film deals in and focuses on the incidental details, the things that seem unimportant – but are nevertheless facts of the matter. As Sheehan pointed out, ‘the film is not about the murders or why he murdered … I am interested in what his banal/everyday [actions] symbolize to us.’ ³

Clearly, one of the pleasures of watching (and, indeed, making) animation is that we know that what we are watching (or creating) is a completely constructed world: everything is built, rendered, and fashioned (or, to use another term – performed) by the unseen hands of the animator. As I have already noted, animation is a peculiarly performative process and animating constitutes a particular form of performance – the giving of life to inanimate objects and things via a repeated, almost ritualistic sets of actions. In the case of animation that is representing real events, the facts depicted are unavoidably read through the lens of the fact that an animator has intervened, interpreted and incrementally built up the world we are viewing.

One of the scenes in the ten mark involves Christie sitting at his kitchen table, having a cup of tea: that most British of everyday rituals (see Figure 1). The film cuts from a wide shot using (admittedly, fairly static) puppet animation to a close-up of what are obviously real hands (see Figure 2). (In fact, in an early rough-cut version of the film, the hands in the shot were actually Sheehan’s: ‘the hands of the animator’). One of the things Sheehan wanted to explore in the film is the tension between elements:

It was an aim of mine to play on the disjointedness between the set, the figure and the hands. I wanted to exploit the relationships between these separate elements and leave the viewer unsure, perhaps uncomfortable, with how they fit together. ⁴

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Christie at his kitchen table having tea. Still from the ten mark (2010). © Joe Sheehan. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 2.

The ‘real’ hands of Christie. Still from the ten mark (2010). © Joe Sheehan. Reproduced with permission.

A key distinction between fiction and nonfiction is the way in which these modes address the viewer and the level of ‘belief’ (or suspension of belief) that the viewer is expected to hold. (I return to this later, when discussing the related concept of ‘alief’.) We are familiar with the definition of fiction being a construct about a world, and nonfiction being a construct about the world; there are therefore different levels of investment, as it were, depending on the status of what we are watching. In puppet/stop motion animation, this ‘tension’ between ‘worlds’ – the ontology of the real event being re-presented and the ontology of the puppet animation – is foregrounded and heightened. There are other moments of ‘disjuncture’ in the film, stark juxtapositions between the authenticity of the (painstakingly constructed) sets and the more ‘obviously constructed’ puppet figure. Even though the figure of Christie often lingers in the shadows, when we see him at all, it is immediately evident that it is a puppet we are looking at.

Of course, one objection that can be levelled at my reading of the ten mark is that it is not a documentary at all, not even a variant of documentary, but is more of an experimental chamber piece, a detailed kind of animated ‘costume drama’ inspired by the real-life actions of a real-life killer. However, my interest in this film as a documentary extends beyond its status as a simple representation of an historical set of events. Clearly, the film does engage with John Christie as a real socio-historical entity, but it does so in a way that is oblique and associative, more to do with atmosphere and allusion than depicting in order to explain. It might be difficult, if not impossible, for some (perhaps most) viewers to ‘read’ the film in the ‘correct’ way, due to the lack of a ‘contextualizing’ frame. Sheehan deliberately refuses to include things such as voiceover (whether an explanatory narrator, or an actor playing the role of Christie) or captions. One common sense ‘test’ for whether something is a documentary (or whether it works as a documentary) is what the viewer can ‘learn’ or have explained to them about the real-world subject matter. the ten mark clearly falls short of this test, because it is deliberately allusive and tells us nothing, directly, about Christie or his crimes. Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that this ‘common sense test’ probably limits the field of documentary, in what other ways might this animated film be considered a documentary?

At the heart of the answer to this question is the performative nature of animation: the peculiar ways in which animation is a record not of what passes before the camera, but of much else besides. Paul Wells (1997: 44) has alluded to the ways in which animated documentary can open out the potential of documentary more generally in what he refers to as the category of ‘fantastic documentary’. In his typology, this refers to ‘a model of documentary which [relocates] the “realist” mode within a seemingly non-realist context’. Furthermore, it is ’documentary not as “film of record” but as “film of recognition”, revealing the underlying value systems and relationships beneath rationalized, supposedly civilized, naturalized cultures’. It is no surprise that Wells’s main example here is the work of the Czech surrealist (and puppet/object animator) Jan Svankmajer, whose work pivots on the viewer engaging at a level where the mundane and prosaic are ‘recognized’ in all their bizarre glory. A cup of tea, a pair of hands, a picture on a wall, a tray. A momentary glimpse of a figure in the shadows. A curtain moving back and forth in the breeze. These are some of the elements of the everyday in Sheehan’s film, used to allusively refer to Christie, ask the viewer to ‘recognize’ what has gone on, rather than simply offering us a ‘record’ of it.

At another point in the film, a series of static shots of the interior of the house are followed by the close-up shot of the tray leaning against the wall; as it slides to the floor with a crash, there is a cut to the figure of Christie, sitting at his kitchen table (see Figure 3). He appears to be motionless, but there is an almost imperceptible movement of one of his hands, nervously brushing his leg. This is another instance of background research and the creative treatment afforded by animation: Sheehan revealed to me ⁵ that he had read an official court record of one of Christie’s appearances, where the nervous twitch of the hand on the leg was noted. The animator thought long and hard about whether it was ‘admissible’ to include the gesture in his nonfictional animated reworking of Christie in his house, prior to arrest; no-one can say for certain, after all, how Christie behaved behind closed doors (although reports of his neighbours tended to reveal a secretive and furtive individual).

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Figure 3.

Christie startled by the crash of the tray. Still from the ten mark (2010). © Joe Sheehan. Reproduced with permission.

Does this then make the ten mark less a ‘documentary’ than a nonfictional ‘re-imagining’? In order to answer this question, it is important to stress that the viewer’s interpretation of the sounds and images they are hearing and seeing is vital. This is not to say that someone can interpret a film as a documentary when it clearly is not one (see Plantinga, 2000). But the viewer’s understanding of what he or she is watching – including any pre-knowledge of the film, its creator, and other ‘secondary discourses’ surrounding them, alongside the intentions of the filmmaker or animator – contribute greatly to the final designation or labelling of the film in question as ‘fiction’, ‘nonfiction’, ‘documentary’ or some other category. Noel Carroll (2003: 193–224), dissatisfied with the terms ‘documentary’ and ‘nonfiction’ – which he sees as too prescriptive and too vague respectively – has devised the neologism ‘film of presumptive assertion’. Simply put, there is a ‘communicative loop’ in which the filmmaker constructs a film with a certain intention to assert that such-and-such happened in reality, and the viewer ‘reciprocates’ by watching the material and presuming that the filmmaker wishes them to view and understand the film in this way (i.e. as asserting that such-and-such happened in reality, rather than imagining it as a fantasy or fiction). It is within this loop that the activity commonly understood to be ‘documentary’ takes place (although, as already noted, Carroll finds that term unsatisfactory as a label).

In the case of the ten mark, despite its clear ‘staginess’, the fact that it is created via stop motion using a puppet, and appears to embrace ‘minor’ details and obscurity over explanatory power, it is possible to argue for it being seen as a film that fits into Carroll’s category. ⁶ There is a problem in the sense that we might watch the film not knowing that we are meant to ‘take up’ the material as something that is being proposed as assertoric – in other words, we might not ‘know’ that Sheehan is presenting these scenes as asserted (rather than completely imagined). Carroll (2003: 202–203) talks about the ‘fictive stance’ in order to clarify his category of the film of presumptive assertion as its ‘logically contrary stance’:

There is a design intention when it comes to fiction – namely, that we imagine the content of the story in question. Moreover, we adopt this attitude when consuming a fiction because we recognise that this is what the sender intends us to do, presupposing that we wish to use the story in the way in which it was designed to be used. So, when we read that Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street, we imagine that he lives on Baker Street. Moreover, our mental state or attitude here is one of imagining, rather than, say, one of believing, because we recognize that Conan Doyle intends us to imagine rather than to believe that Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street.

There is, then, a distinction between fiction (where we are intended to imagine) and nonfiction (where we are intended to believe). However, with an inherently hybrid (and clearly ‘artificial’) form like an animated film that is re-presenting something from real life, there is a blurring of this distinction. It exists in a liminal space between imagination and belief; this is where the concept of ‘alief’ is useful.

Animated performances, documentary and ‘alief’: towards a conclusion

In her discussion of viewer responses to documentary material, Annette Hill (2008: 226) talks about how viewers will ‘draw on the referential integrity and the aesthetic value of documentary at the same time’. This (admittedly precarious) balancing of a response to the realism (i.e. referential integrity) and the artistry (i.e. aesthetic value) of documentary media has roots that go right back to the Griersonian definition of documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. It also underscores the fact that we are talking about a spectrum of activity here: where ‘realism’ and ‘artistry’ might be more or less to the fore, depending on the type of documentary we are talking about. Hill’s argument is an important one because she emphasizes the viewer’s ‘doubled’ response to documentary by invoking a psychodynamic model derived from the work of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. Thus: ‘The simple experiencing self and the complex reflecting self enable the person to process life according to different and yet interdependent modes of engagement: one immersive, the other reflective’ (quoted in Hill, 2008: 226). In a similar vein, Buchan’s (2006) discussion of the viewer’s perception of animated ‘worlds’, particularly those seen in the puppet animation of the Quay Brothers, makes theories of spectatorship central to the argument: it is the viewer’s perception, their phenomenological experience of a world they know does not ‘exist’, at least not in any ‘straightforward’ way, that structures their understanding of the film. Of course, where the fields of documentary and animation most definitely appear to part company is in spectator-positioning and the phenomenology of experiencing the sounds and images. Our ‘experience’ of something that we know to be ontologically ‘out there’, having a real-world existence, such as real historical figures and events (i.e. a documentary) is qualitatively different from something that we know to be inherently manufactured frame by frame (i.e. an animated film). The point is, I would argue, that this is not an ‘either/or’ choice but a dialectical relationship, where we effectively position ourselves on a spectrum of responses, depending on the level of belief we have in what we are viewing. Buchan (2006: 22) quotes Malcolm Turvey on theories of spectatorship, who says these ‘theories are designed to overcome the conceptual problem raised by the “paradox of fiction”, namely the paradox of the spectator responding emotionally to what he knows does not exist’.

Philosopher Tamar Gendler (2008) talks about the difference between belief/believing on the one hand and alief/alieving on the other, and I think this is a useful distinction for understanding such a paradox. I also think it can help us when talking about animated performance, especially that which is animating a performance from a factual basis. For our purposes, and at the risk of oversimplifying, suffice it to say that there are some instances where what someone believes to be the case is at odds with how they act or respond. It is in these cases that Gendler has found the term ‘alief’ to be useful. For example: a person may believe that a bridge or platform is absolutely safe, but they alieve that it is not and that they are in danger, and recoil, feeling afraid. Gendler’s colleague Paul Bloom (2010) puts it succinctly: ‘Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem’ (emphasis added). He continues: ‘the point of alief is to capture the fact that our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast between events that we believe to be real versus those that seem to be real, or that are imagined to be real.’ Although a good deal more research needs to be done on how viewers interpret and empathize with animated characters and actions, I would suggest that the phenomenologically charged responses we see described by Gendler and Bloom, responses that appear to contradict common sense or come from a deeper wellspring of emotion, are also at work when viewing stop motion animation. In the ten mark, the extraordinary levels of detail in set construction, the apparently perverse lack of movement, the ‘obviousness’ of the Christie puppet, and the disjuncture of the real hands all combine to make a film – an animated documentary – that stresses the tense relationship between how things actually are and how they might seem.