6 - Animated Documentary and Mental Health

Summary

The ethical responsibilities of collaborative narrative for both those who create the work and the audiences who receive it, as well as the importance of keeping open the possibility of witnessing for others through particular formal strategies, are evident from the discussion in Chapters 4 and 5. A form that returns to these questions but also sheds new light on the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects and viewers is the animated documentary. In exploring animated documentaries that treat mental illness this chapter also returns to, and develops further, several previous threads: the politics of visibility/concealment and the need to expand narratives about health, allowing multiple perspectives and open-endedness, with which this book opened; the distinct ways the animated documentary negotiates the attempt (and failure) to apprehend the experience of illness that many of the chapters have examined in relation to various forms and collaborations; the medium's political and broadly pedagogical significance for fighting stigma and intervening in debates within medicine and broader culture; and finally, the need to challenge instrumentalising approaches towards animation coming from either the sciences or the arts through creative dialogue and critical interloping.

Since the twentieth century, animation has been used for clarification and illustration as well as for educational, training and propaganda purposes. Even when it deals with complex social issues, the visual language it uses, like that of comics, allows it to communicate information in a more accessible manner than the written word, especially for an increasingly visual-literate population. This accessibility means that, while still widely associated with entertainment because of Disney's central role in the industry, animation is used in several cultural fields including science, education, politics, film, art and occupational therapy. In recent years it has increasingly been given serious attention by animation and documentary critics and has entered a range of non-fiction media practices. The recent production of animated documentaries on topics such as blood donation, plastic surgery, autism, blindness and synaesthesia is an indication of the ways this genre is used to engage with concerns of contemporary life, including with public health. The histories of comics and animation – forms traditionally associated with children, fantasy or marginalised tastes – have only begun to be written and documented in the medical/health humanities, and their full potential for communicating illness experience is still to be examined.