Abstract
By combining film studies, phenomenology and disability studies, Greenberg offers an analysis of two animated documentary series that explore disabled experience: Animated Minds and Creature Discomforts. Although they utilise different aesthetic styles – graphic animation and clay animals – both series rely on visual metaphors to evoke their viewer’s bodily senses. This chapter examines corporeal metaphors that embody experiences of disability and suggests that by emphasising sensible/sentient bodies, animated documentaries may potentially evoke viewers’ embodiment. The metaphoric imagery, which is aurally accompanied by subjective testimonies about life with disability, enhances intersubjective engagement by illustrating the testimonies as experienced through and by the bodies of their subjects, thus touching spectators’ own bodies. In some cases, spectators are further confronted with the socially bestowed privileges of their bodies.
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Notes
- 1.
Two fictional animated series about disability worth mentioning are Punky (Simon Crane, 2011), a cartoon for children featuring a character with Down syndrome, and Tim Sharp’s drawings-turned-into-cartoon Laser Beak Man (Igor Coric, 2011) about an autistic superhero.
- 2.
For example: Fear (Dawan Dreyer and Andrea Love, 2016), Rocks in My Pockets (Signe Baumane, 2014), My Depression: The Up and Down and Up of it (Robert Marianetti, Elizabeth Swados and David Wachtenheim, 2014) and Everything Will Be OK (Don Herzfeldt, 2006). This is also apparent in animation for children, including Pixar’s Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen, 2015), or Finding Dory (Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane, 2016), a sequel to Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, 2003).
- 3.
Interestingly, Landerth was inspired by Aardman’s Creature Comforts (Nick Park, 1989). See Robertson (2004).
- 4.
I re-appropriate Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World, which implies that to be human is to be immersed in the physical, and read the shorts as offering another option to human experience.
- 5.
It needs to be noted that Adam Elliot also uses claymation in his works on disability (the shorts trilogy Uncle (1996), Cousin (1999) and Brother (2000) and the feature Mary and Max (2009)). He is currently working on a second trilogy on disability (Harvie Krumpet (2003) and Ernie Biscuit (2015)).
- 6.
The comic tone of the series also comes from its references to Creature Comforts.
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Greenberg, S. (2017). (Dis)abling the Spectator: Embodying Disability Experience in Animated Documentary. In: Brylla, C., Hughes, H. (eds) Documentary and Disability. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59894-3_9
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