The fostering of closer links between documentary and animation has long been a priority for DOK Leipzig, which was the first festival to feature a dedicated sidebar for animadocs in 1997.
Since then, the festival has provided a showcase for such hybrid films as Phil Mulloy’s The Wind Of Changes, Shui-Bo Wang’s Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square and Anka Schmid’s Hairy.
A new chapter came last year with the staging of the first Animation Lab DOK Leipzig, in collaboration with CEE Animation, to help producers who are developing their first animated documentary learn more about the international animation industry.
Now the Lab’s second edition will be led by veteran French producer Jean-François Le Corre, of Rennes-based animation studio Vivement Lundi, and the multidisciplinary artist Uri Kranot. The four-day workshop will address such topics as film narrative, project development and pre-production, as well as distribution.
“I’ll try to push the teams to think about their stories before thinking about animation,” says Le Corre. “Whether they are sure that they need animation for their movies, whether they have chosen the right style of animation. Animation must be used as a powerful and meaningful narrative tool, not as a way to fill a visual hole.”
The eight projects selected to participate in this year’s Lab include Night Gardener, the debut feature from UK filmmaker Daniel Gough. A deeply personal exploration of the complex relationship between the filmmaker and his father, an ICU doctor, the film features animations of the strange fairytales Gough’s father told him when he was a child.
It is produced by award-winning producer Anne Milne of Hand-drawn pictures, who will be in Leipzig with the project. It is Milne’s first feature documentary as a producer, as well as the first project she has worked on that blends documentary with animation, and she is under no illusion of the challenges it poses.
“Animation production is known for being time consuming and labour intensive as it takes a long time to create short amounts of footage so, from that perspective, it is expensive to produce,” she observes. “Using animation also means finding collaborators; a studio or building a team in order to produce the animation. That is an element that is absent from a documentary, which relies solely on observation footage and/or archive.”
Yet she points out that “animation in documentary allows the filmmaker to recreate events, to bring people back to life, to interrogate dreams and memories, and bring a magical aspect to the storytelling.”
Added potential
Le Corre first discovered the potential of adding animation to documentary in 2004, when telling the story of 1960s children’s TV series The Magic Roundabout created by French director Serge Danot.
“We didn’t have any footage of Danot and so animated a short 2D biopic,” he recalls. “The result was great, more creative and funny than a classical edit of footage.”
Since then, Le Corre has been involved in the making of such internationally acclaimed productions as Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Oscar-nominated Flee and Alain Ughetto’s No Dogs Or Italians Allowed, which was the opening film at DOK Leipzig in 2022.
After his experiences working on these two films, Le Corre says he is wary of using the term ‘animated documentaries’. “Audiences don’t understand it, and Rasmussen and Ughetto’s films deserve more than this kind of technical definition,” he suggests. “Flee is a survival and coming of age movie andNo Dogs a love story.”
This also informed his decision to serve as a co-producer on the French-Czech feature Suzanne, a biopic of pioneering French plastic surgeon Suzanne Noël, which will be the subject of a DOK Industry Talk he will give on October 31.
“Anaïs Caura and Joëlle Oosterlinck’s project is more than a classical portrait and, since we found only a few photos of Suzanne Noël, there was room for animation… and fiction,” he says. ”We decided to re-write the script with more fiction, with the ambition of delivering a biopic of an emancipated woman inspired by a movie like The Devil Wears Prada or the TV show The Knick.”
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