The animated documentary and ‘psychorealism’

The starting point for this paper is ‘psychorealism’, a term which Chris Landreth coined for the way in which animation can depict internal realities; I will discuss my interpretation of psychorealism, and apply it to the making of the 2010 film An Eyeful of Sound.

In 2004 Chris Landreth won the animated short film Oscar® for his film Ryan, an animated documentary about his interviews with the animator Ryan Larkin. Barbara Robertson (2004) notes in an interview with Landreth, that at first he began taping interviews with Larkin in a fairly standard documentary fashion with a view to making something along the lines of Aardman’s Creature Comforts films.

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The postwar emergence of manga and anime as mass media directed at children emphasized the importance of shōjo and shōnen (boys and girls) characters that encouraged its targeted audience to achieve easy identification. As teenagers gradually became the intended key audience, an increasing range of imagined lives were displayed in these visual narratives. From the late 1950s onwards, popular culture and related merchandizing focused on the teen years as an idealized time period that eventually became viewed less as a period of transition than an end in itself. Over the last thirty years the teen years in Japan have become less a time of preparation for the adult world than an apogee that can only be followed by a decline into the confining expectations of career and family during the remaining decades of life.

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When Exposure and Disguise Converge

Since the 1990s there has been a rise in the use of documentary materials in film and visual arts, most commonly referred to as “The Documentary Turn” (Nash, 2004). The complexity of what defines realities and the questioning of epistemological limits is part of the contemporary fascination with the documentary. M. Doel and D. Clarke spotlight some of the central issues of this discourse when they claim that “today we must face…the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real” (1999, p. 265). Past distinctions between fact and fiction now require reconsideration and, as this paper will show, the changing uses of animation in contemporary visual culture emphasise these increasingly blurred boundaries. The emerging field of animated documentaries highlights many of the challenges that abound in current explorations of the nature and documentation of realities and the truth value required of an image to be accepted as a representation of the real.

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Introduction
3D computer graphics tend to be realistic and explicit. The creation of photo-realistic images by computer has been a long term goal of film industry and academia in computer graphic research (Safarian 2003), and arguably, the goal has nearly been achieved except for certain minor areas such as the realistic human face with expressions. Even this last challenge has possibly been solved as images showed in the recent live-action productions, such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fincher 2008) and Avatar (Cameron 2009).
However, if the purpose of computer graphic is for visual communication or storytelling, 2D graphical style is an alternative approach to create digital art or produce computer animations. The 2D graphical approach can benefit the animation production both aesthetically and economically.

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