Evocative animated documentaries, imagination and knowledge

ABSTRACT

This article refines previously made claims that evocative animated documentaries enable us to gain knowledge about unfamiliar states of mind and mental experiences through prompting our imagination. Building on recent scholarship in philosophy of mind, cognitive film theory and film and animation studies, I argue that it is evocative animated documentaries that do not, counterintuitively, invite audiences to identify or empathise with individual characters or documentary subjects that effectively prompt knowledge-through-imagination. This is because these films elicit a primarily epistemological rather than emotional response. The films in question, which include the Animated Minds films (2003–ongoing) and An Eyeful of Sound (Samantha Moore, 2010), feature documentary subjects that stand in for a mental health condition or psychological state that we are invited to primarily understand rather than feel. It is in this way that these evocative animated documentaries are less like fiction than their live-action documentary counterparts, despite their animated form. Applying philosophical ideas on the relationship between imagination and knowledge to a new filmic context, this article offers a way of understanding how these films work and how they are effective as documentaries of subjective, psychological experience

KEYWORDS:

• Imagination
• knowledge
• animated documentary
• empathy
• epistemology
• philosophy of mind

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 More details of each series can be found at https://www.animatedminds.com/watch-the-series

2 See Honess Roe (2013) chapter 1 for further discussion of these questions

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annabelle Honess Roe

Annabelle Honess Roe is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey, who works on documentary, animation, and the media industries. She is the author of Animated Documentary (2013) which won the 2015 Society for Animation Studies McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Book. She has also edited Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop Motion Film (2020, forthcoming) and co-edited Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (2018) and The Animation Studies Reader (2019).