A body too many: Animated documentary’s dis-embodiment and re-embodiment of factual interviews

This paper intends to address the body in animated documentaries (i.e. those animated films to which is recognized documentary value, due to the fact that they are about our world, rather than an imaginary world), and in particular in those animated documentaries that recur to factual interviews. Such audiovisual works, whose production has flourished in the last two decades, are composed sound wise by recordings of real-life interviews. But image wise the original human body to which these declarations pertain is absented and substituted by a fabricated one that in many cases doesn’t even resemble by far its factual counterpart. The new body can serve as a mask in order to protect the identity of the speaker, and therefore consent him to freely express himself without the fear of possible consequences on his persona (as it occurs in Southern Ladies Animation Group’s It’s Like That). But this interviews’ re-embodiment in an animated character can also be pursued for comical reasons (as it happens for instance in Nick Park’s Creature Comforts, where real people’s declarations on their life conditions are embodied in zoo animals) and/or to enable the filmmaker to pass comment on the events depicted. Nevertheless, whichever the case, by absenting the original body and substituting it with a different one not only these films become affected by historical fictions’ identical problem of finding themselves ‘with a body too many’ (Nichols 1991: 294), but also their soundtracks’ documentary value is lessened or totally aborted in favor of either a comical or a dramatic effect. In light of the foregoing, this paper intends to argue that paradoxically these animated documentaries are the demonstration that the body is central not only to how the viewer gains knowledge of an interview, as noted by Bill Nichols (1991), but also, more broadly, to his perception of an audiovisual product’s factuality.