Animation and Affirmative Aging in Ignacio Ferreras’s Arrugas

This paper enters the ongoing debate on the portrayal of old age in Ignacio Ferreras’s animated feature Arrugas (Spain, 2011). My approach to a new understanding of Ferreras’s film is two-fold: first, I engage with the often-overlooked animation to ask how it too contributes to the cinematic vision of later life; second, I aim to liberate Arrugas from the predominant binary discourses of successful aging/aging-as-decline often employed to understand the film. Drawing on theories of animation and aging, I highlight how Arrugas reflects later life as more complex, a notion central to Linn Sandberg’s theory of affirmative old age.