The Reasons for Animating Reality: Animated Documentary and Re-enactment in the Work of Jonas Odell

Abstract

This chapter discusses three animated documentaries by filmmaker Jonas Odell: Never Like the First Time! (2006), Lies (2008), and Tussilago (2010). Comparative analysis establishes many of the criteria against which these films are generally considered to be examples of animated documentary practice. In all three works, documentary audio interviews are integrated as voiceover and form the foundations on which Odell as animator-filmmaker visually “packages” interviewees’ stories in ways that render them more interesting and attractive to audiences. As with many other animated documentaries, Odell’s stylistic and technical choices strike a balance between aesthetic aspiration and documentary responsibility to the sense and meaning of his interviewees’ stories. Odell’s filmmaking choices exemplify animated documentary’s distinctive capacity to translate complex communicational codes and data – for example, interviewees’ experiences of memory, the varied styles of their spoken narrations, and the subjective quality of Odell’s interpretations of their testimonies – into concrete, highly distinctive audio-visual forms.