Source: Amidi, A. (2014). Oscar-Contender Signe Baumane On Why Animation Beats Live-Action for Some Stories. [online] Cartoon Brew. Available at: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/award-season-focus/oscar-contender-signe-baumane-on-why-animation-beats-live-action-for-some-stories-106308.html [Accessed 26 Nov. 2014].
She talks about why she chooses animation as the medium for telling her stories. It frees the storyteller from physical constraints of live-action filming and allows impossible images and things from outside the boundaries of reality to be depicted. The above quote is from an interview Baumane had with Vice. The film she discussed in this instance is her oscar-nominated 'Rocks in my Pockets' which deals with the depression and mental illness faced by many members of her family."Telling that amount of history in a live action film is nearly impossible. Showing how a person feels from inside, how depression works from inside, is also nearly impossible in live action. Do you remember that film A Beautiful Mind about the mathematician who went crazy? To depict his state of mind, they used blurry spinning images. This is all the language you have in live action. In animation it’s different; you can just walk into a person’s mind and you can show everything going on in there. In animation you’re free to do anything you want.And what really bums me out is that animation is misunderstood as a medium for children; this makes me really upset. Animation has been around for ages, it was the first moving images. Then sometime around the 1920s, it was hijacked by children."
I can see just from watching the trailer how Baumane might feel she has to rebel against the notion of animation being a child-centric artform. Her film deals with the very adult topics of mental health, family relations, suicide and isolation. The visual metaphors employed are mature in nature, with concepts that young children would not even be able to grasp. The aesthetic, while cartoonish, looks almost scary with the exaggerated facial features, imaginary creatures and dark shadowy backgrounds.
