Category: Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language

I chose Waltz with Bashir as an example of an animated documentary that challenges traditional ideas of documentary legitimacy. The film explores director Ari Folman’s fragmented memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, using animation to reconstruct experiences that cannot be fully represented through live-action footage. Rather than presenting an objective historical account, the film focuses on personal memory, trauma, and reflection.

The work engages strongly with themes of politics, government, ethical responsibility, and human rights. Animation allows the film to visualise suppressed memories, dreams, and emotional states, making it particularly effective in addressing the psychological impact of war. In this context, animation does not weaken the documentary form but strengthens it by communicating subjective truth.

The use of animation is central to the film’s meaning. Many of the events shown exist only through personal testimony, so animation becomes a necessary tool rather than a stylistic choice. The combination of animated imagery with recorded interviews helps ground the film in reality while allowing space for abstraction.

Overall, Waltz with Bashir demonstrates that animated documentary can be a legitimate and powerful medium. By prioritising emotional truth and ethical reflection over visual realism, the film shows how animation can address complex political and social issues in ways that conventional documentary cannot.

The Crow is an experimental animated short that combines AI-generated imagery with dance performance. The film resists conventional narrative structure and instead focuses on atmosphere, transformation, and symbolic movement. Its abstract setting and dark visual tone contribute to an unsettling mood, while the transformation of a human dancer into a crow-like figure explores themes of metamorphosis, hybridity, and identity. Although it draws on recognisable elements of dance film, its use of AI places it outside traditional genre categories.

The meaning of The Crow is closely tied to its form. Rather than telling a clear story, the film uses movement and visual instability as expressive tools. The artist appears to embrace the limitations of AI generation, such as distorted anatomy and fluctuating textures, allowing these imperfections to reinforce the theme of transformation. As a result, the work functions conceptually rather than narratively, encouraging intuitive interpretation.

Process plays a central role in the film. AI is not simply a tool but an active agent that reshapes the original dance performance. By allowing the algorithm to reinterpret human motion, the film highlights the relationship between technology and meaning, where the process itself becomes part of the message.

Formally, The Crow investigates movement, rhythm, and transition. The dancer’s balletic motion is fragmented through AI-generated transformations, creating tension between elegance and instability. Minimal use of space, muted colour, and restrained audio further emphasise the figure’s isolation. Overall, the film exemplifies experimental animation by prioritising process, transformation, and perception over narrative clarity.

This week’s lecture focused on narrative structure and film editing as key foundations of effective storytelling. It introduced classical narrative models such as the three-act and five-act structures, highlighting the importance of establishing context, developing conflict, and achieving narrative resolution. Drawing on Paul Wells’ theories of animation, the lecture emphasised the need for creators to understand the language of the medium and to transform observation and experience into engaging narratives.

The editing section examined editing as a primary tool for constructing narrative continuity and guiding audience engagement. Through techniques such as continuity editing, montage, and the organisation of spatial and temporal relationships, editing helps shape narrative clarity, rhythm, and emotional impact. Overall, the lecture demonstrated how narrative structure and editing work together to support clear, compelling, and emotionally effective storytelling, particularly in animation.