News
Childhood Memories
Childhood perspective is an effective lens from which to explore difficult, often adult or taboo, themes in animation. Two of the animated films featured in Manipulate this year take on the issues of war and child exploitation, respectively. Both take different approaches and styles, but prove that lived experience can be depicted in animated form and provide new, insightful commentaries on difficult contemporary concerns.
My Favourite War Using different textures - film, Communist poster art and cute animation all mesh together here- multi-award winning full-length feature My Favourite War is the autobiography of Latvian-Norwegian director Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen, and her experiences of growing up in Soviet-occupied Latvia over two decades, from 1970 through to1990. Iniitially, the children play at being soldiers and are force-fed romantic drama as the country is being ripped apart. But children are resilient people, and Ilze and her family's refusal to kow-tow to the red propaganda machine, as well as her own strength of character, are what sets this vivid, intelligent and colourful animation apart from typical coming-of-age 'misery memoirs'.It's powerful, sometimes humorous, often chilling, and a poignant symbol of resistance and a push for democratic rights.
Annah la Javanaise Meanwhile, this animation from Indonesia, directed by Fatimah Tobing Rony, focuses on the heartbreaking true story of a thirteen year old sold into unpaid slavery to the artist Paul Gaugin in 1893. Scenes of the saucer-eyed child being sold off by her family and crossing to Paris on her own are almost unbearable, reinforcing her coltish vulnerability. The animation is ethereal, richly detailed and takes a delicate approach to a subject which, in the wrong hands, could come across as prurient or ill-judged.Instead,it is sensitive and soulful ,showing how the muse lost her identity in a time when girls on the cusp of womanhood were often deemed expendable to well-known painters and their rich patrons. It's 'plus ca change, plus c'est la meme', in many cases. Above all, though, it's a moving fight for survival in the time of colonialism. In these days of both hypersexulisation at one extreme, and cancel culture on the other, the film strikes an even-handed tone.
Lorna Irvine
