Alex Heeney takes a look at some of the animated documentaries that screened at HotDocs 2024, including Pelikan Blue, The Day Iceland Stood Still, Grand Theft Hamlet, and Silent Trees.
All about animated documentaries: Our ebook Subjective Realities: The Art of Creative Nonfiction features a series of interviews with filmmakers about their animated documentaries by Alex Heeney. Get your copy of .
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When HotDocs held its press conference to announce the festival this year, there was more press around the festival and the hordes of programming staff that had just quit in protest than the programming. HotDocs had previously gone to the national newspapers to lay out their financial troubles, the need to make money at this year’s festival, and the need to cut the programming. This year’s programming was significantly streamlined compared to past editions, often favouring crowd-pleasing Disney movies over more thought-provoking international cinema.
As a lover of creative nonfiction cinema — I wrote the book on it — the biggest blow was the festival’s decision to cancel their Markers program. Named after Chris Marker, whose film Sans Soleil had a gorgeous retrospective screening at this year’s festival, the Markers Program, which programmer Jesse Cummings described as “the bleeding edges [of documentary]: there are a lot of different ways in which these films shoot off from traditional documentary form, so I like to try and have a balance of these different modes that filmmakers are exploring.”
The Markers program was a recent innovation at the festival and by no means the only films at the festival to put “form front and center.” One of the most formally precise and best films to screen at the festival in recent years screened in the Canadian Spectrum before Markers existed: First Stripes, about the Canadian military and one of Seventh Row’s picks for the 50 best films of the 2010s (We delve deep into the film in our ebook The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook). But the festival’s choice to cut the program is in line with its increasing, though by no means new, tilt toward seeing documentaries as delivery devices first and cinema second.
HotDocs prioritizes viewing documentaries as information delivery over cinema
Since I started attending HotDocs almost twenty years ago, the program descriptions of the festival’s films have always focused on subject matter. The festival divides the films into programs based on the topic. These range from music docs (“Pop/Life”) to “The Changing Face of Europe” to technology (“Emergence – Docs on Technology”). The festival’s marketing has always focused on what you can learn through films about everything from extreme sports (last year’s The Deepest Breath and this year’s 7 Beats Per Minute), contemporary politics, to the always popular Toronto issues docs like last year’s Someone Lives Here.
“It’s not what a movie is about; it’s how it is about it.”
But as Roger Ebert famously said, “It’s not what a movie is about; it’s how it is about it.” If a filmmaker has a strong vision and a knack for storytelling, a documentary can open your eyes to worlds you had no idea you were interested in. First Stripes was case in point. I’d never thought much about the Canadian military before. Still, I was drawn in by the film’s formal verité approach to observing an institution and exposing its toxic culture through thoughtful juxtapositions in the edit. (It’s edited by the great Mathieu Bouchard Malo, who was interviewed in English in our ebook, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook.)
Likewise, I’m casually interested in organ donation, but not enough to watch a whole film about it unless it’s in the hands of Penny Lane, who made last year’s HotDocs masterpiece, Confessions of a Good Samaritan. The film was ostensibly about her journey to becoming a kidney donor. It was also about an existential crisis, finding a way to do good, and how organ donation works and why it’s necessary. (I talked to Penny about the film’s formal innovations on the Seventh Row podcast here.)
Sans Soleil (1983) was the highlight of HotDocs 2024
The best experience I had at the 2024 HotDocs Film Festival was seeing Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) on the big screen at TIFF Cinema 1. It’s a landmark film in the history of creative nonfiction cinema — I wrote the book on its contemporary descendants — which is part travelogue, part memory piece, part essay film. The chance to see classics of cinema on the best screen in Toronto — and the only TIFF cinema with proper ventilation — has all but disappeared. TIFF Cinematheque has pushed its films into Cinema 4, favouring collecting membership fees over catering to audiences. But for Sans Soleil, the projection was beautiful, the CO2 stayed under 800ppm (it was a weekday afternoon at <50% capacity), and I didn’t have to queue for a decent seat. And the film is wonderful!
Animated documentary at HotDocs 2024: Pelikan Blue, Silent Trees, Grand Theft Hamlet, The Day Iceland Stood Still
In search of more formally adventurous works of creative nonfiction, I focused much of my viewing this year on the animated documentaries screening at the festival. Animation as a storytelling tool in documentary is by no means a recent development. The first animated documentary dates back to Winsor McCay’s 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania. In the intervening years, documentarians have used animation to tell autobiographical stories, like Jan Oxenberg’s Thank You and Goodnight (1991), war stories like Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir (2008) and Leanne Pooley’s 25 April (2015), and beyond. However, there weren’t usually multiple animated documentary films each year due to the expense and perhaps even some bias against animation in documentaries.
Following in the footsteps of Flee (2021) – animated documentaries at HotDocs 2024
After the success of the high-profile animated documentary Flee (2021), this year’s festival had several films that felt like they were made in its shadow. Flee was the story of director Jonah Poher Rasmussen’s friend Amin, a gay Afghan refugee living in Denmark who was still emotionally scarred by his migration experience. In Flee, the animation served two key purposes. In the present day, the rotoscoped images of the conversations between director Rasmussen and his subject, Amin, allowed Amin to maintain his anonymity. The more stylized sequences from the past bring to life Amin’s memories of his flight from Kabul to Denmark. These made Amin’s past trauma as vivid to us as it was to him, bringing us right back there with him.
Two HotDocs films about escaping from totalitarian states seem to be directly influenced by Flee: Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Zwiefka’s Silent Trees and Hungarian filmmaker László Csáki’s Pelikan Blue. Pelikan Blue is Hungary’s first animated documentary, and producer Ádám Felszeghy told POV Magazine that Flee directly inspired them. He also suggested that Flee had been a financial disaster despite its critical acclaim, and they are concerned about the prospects for Pelikan Blue. I’ll also review two other animated documentaries at HotDocs on completely different topics: Grand Theft Hamlet and The Day Iceland Stood Still.
Silent Trees – a partially animated documentary at HotDocs
Silent Trees follows a Kurdish family of refugees in Poland who crossed in via the Polish-Belarusian border (also the subject of Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border), survived, and are now in holding at the refugee camp, waiting for their fate to be decided. Zweifka shoots scenes from the present as live action, and animates the memories of the family’s border crossing, much like Rasmussen did in Flee. It’s a moving story, but its adherence to a similar structure as Flee makes it feel like a story we’ve heard. I’m glad to see more and more of these refugee stories. It’s a major international crisis, but I worry that the more similar they become in structure and form, the harder it will be for them to penetrate.
Pelikan Blue – an animated documentary at HotDocs (with some archival and additional footage)
Pelikan Blue is about the forgers who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, helped Hungarians take visits to the West by forging otherwise outrageously expensive train tickets. The film gets its title from a particular type of ink that was easy to chemically erase, making the entire forgery scheme possible. In the present day, the group of animated forgers gather to discuss figuring out how to forge tickets, the adventures this took them on, and how it affected other people. Actors perform their documentary testimony.
Like Flee, the animation in Pelikan Blue anonymizes the forgers and their customers while also bringing us into the memories rather than merely listening to the documentary-recorded voices. Through animated flashbacks, the stories of the time are brought to life, with some scenes invented to illustrate the broader narrative. Csáki intersperses news footage from the day with the animated footage, much like Rasmussen did in Flee, to remind us that this story is true. Some of the imagined scenes in the past are also interspersed with newly filmed footage with similar details to lend the animated imaginings a sense of reality.
Pelikan Blue and Silent Trees
Both Silent Trees and Pelikan Blue effectively use animation to tell the film’s stories. But they feel like re-treads of films like Flee wherein the animation serves the exact same purpose as that film. The visual style of animation differs — Silent Trees is less stylized, and Pelikan Blue has the whimsy and look of network TV cartoons. Though ostensibly hybrid documentaries, the lack of new approaches to form makes these films feel both less exciting and less illuminating than their predecessors, even as they work as standalone pieces (especially if you haven’t seen Flee).
Grand Theft Hamlet – an animated documentary at HotDocs
Less effective was the SXSW documentary that previously screened at Visions du Réel, Grand Theft Hamlet. The film’s conceit — the entire film takes place in Grand Theft Auto gameplay – feels like a re-tread of 2022’s We Met in Virtual Reality, which takes place entirely inside the video game VRChat. Both films are about virtual connections during the early COVID-19 pandemic, when going out to see people in person was to be avoided. Grand Theft Hamlet’s additional idea was to follow two out-of-work actors as they try to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside the game. Although a neat idea, the film raises interesting questions that it never fully explores, counting on the not-so-very-novel-by-now novelty of its premise to sell itself.
The Day Iceland Stood Still at HotDocs
Pamela Hogan’s The Day Iceland Stood Still uses animation, but only sparingly, and is one of the most effective and creative uses of animation I saw at the festival. The film tells the story of October 24, 1975, when more than 90% ofl women in Iceland went on strike — from employment and their homes. Hogan mixes archival footage of the leading activists, with contemporary live-action interviews with the women who took part, with animated sequences to bring the younger version of these women’s stories to life. The sketched look of the animation, both whimsical and too stylized to look quite real, helps to put distance between the memories the women evoke today, dramatized in the animation, with the women we meet now, fifty years later.
The film is a galvanizing look at how collective action can create massive social change. The rag-tag group of women who thought up the strike built enough momentum to shut down the country in progress effectively. The results continue to echo today, where Iceland is far and ahead of many other Western countries when it comes to approaching gender equality. It’s a reminder that ordinary people — those women in the animation shown in the kitchen or typing at work in ordinary milieus — can effect extraordinary change.
Concluding thoughts on animated documentaries at HotDocs 2024
Although this year’s crop of animated docs may have done less to push the boundaries of film form than those in past festival editions, it’s nice to see animation becoming an essential tool in documentarians’ toolboxes. These strong films use animation to fill in storytelling blanks that would have been otherwise hard to fill. The stories themselves are strong and engaging, even if innovation, for the most part, takes a back seat.
Related reading/listening to animated documentaries at HotDocs
More animated documentaries: Read our interviews with animated documentary filmmakers Leanne Pooley (25 April), Penny Lane (NUTS!), Tomasz Wolski (1970), Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee), and more!
Get our ebook on creative nonfiction, Subjective Realities, which features a case study on animated documentary.
More HotDocs: Read all our HotDocs coverage from this year and beyond.
