A few months back, the BFI presented a series of events to celebrate hand-drawn animation, with an exhibition on the works of animation studio Laika, director talks from the likes of Henry Selick and Guillermo del Toro, and showings of films such as Coraline and Pinocchio.
As film critic Mark Kermode recently commented, this BFI series demonstrated that animation is enjoying something of a golden age and this thought resonated with me after seeing a short-film earlier this week on the most difficult of subjects.
Survivor uses simple hand-drawn puppet animation techniques to depict the true story of 92-year-old Holocaust survivor Ivor Perl. It tells the story of how in 1944, a 12-year-old Perl and his family were taken by the Nazis from their home village in Hungary to forced labor camps and a ghetto. Eventually, brought to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, the film depicts the horrors of what Ivor and his brother experienced in the camp and how, unlike most, they were able to survive and come to England.
Directed by Zoom Rockman, an award-winning cartoonist and puppeteer, the almost entirely handmade film was completed in less than a year and features music by composer Eran Baron Cohen.
Even if less sophisticated than major animated feature films, Survivor emphasizes how effective animation is as a story-telling medium for even the most difficult of subjects.
Following the screening, the journalist and broadcaster Adam Boulton led a Q&A with Rockman and 92-year-old Ivor Perl. Rockman told Boulton that he hand-drew all the characters, which were then animated as puppets and then captured in-camera as live action. (Disclaimer: this writer’s son worked as a camera assistant on the film for one day).
Rockman explained that as well as Perl’s book, he researched the events to ensure their accuracy by cross-referencing with descriptions by other sources such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Rockman also made research trips to the camp at Auschwitz to ensure that the depictions of the buildings represented in the film were spatially accurate.
Watching the simple, child-like animation in Survivor made me recall the sweet, simple style of the TV show Ivor the Engine that I watched as a child: a comparison that made the terrible setting of Survivor even more brutal.
By using puppets and simple captions to tell a meticulously researched true story, Survivor showed how animation can serve as an effective tool to educate younger audiences about terrible events such as the Holocaust, to counter denial and explain the true nature of genocide.
