In Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (1992), the striking red plane flown by the main character, Porco, allows him to defeat pirates while soaring through the Adriatic skies, as well as allowing him to accomplish a more mysterious and restorative form…
Flesh (Carne) is a Brazilian animated documentary directed by Camila Kater in 2019. Flesh follows the story of five women in different phases of life as they speak about their ambiguous relationship with their own bodies, as well as their…
It is an understatement to say dealing with death is a difficult thing. The 2017 short film Negative Space by Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata is reminiscent of the mental headspace where one may try to recall the rose-tinted memories…
In his introduction to Eco-Trauma Cinema, Anil Narine states that “nature, whether it threatens us, we threaten it or we see ourselves as part of it, remains sublime” and resistant to any meaning we try to make out of it…
‘Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a band tying us to the eternal present […] Memory nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic [… It] takes root in the concrete, in…
Spain is suffering from a crisis of memory and, although there is little consensus as to whether this crisis is one of too much remembrance or too little, what cannot be avoided is the prevalence of the topic in screen…
What do we mean by ‘history’? The term itself is much contested. History (with a capital ‘H’) is often reserved for ‘official histories’ of events, these are usually imbued with hegemonic priorities and neglect many voices that could contribute to…
As a film-maker who has become further and further drawn into the world of animated documentary, what has enthralled and inspired me is the overt subjectivity of exploring the world through animation; free from the ‘baggage’ of objectivity implied in…
Theorists of film and photography, from Barthes to Benjamin, have often drawn our attention to photographic media as a way of accessing history. However, animated documentaries such as Places Other People Have Lived (Yilmaz, 2011), Learned by Heart (Rimminen and…
