Fugitive Sketches: Flee’s Charcoal Smudges and the Importance of Ambiguity

Like many other animated documentaries, Flee combines a mixture of animation styles and archival footage, which aim to question shifting forms of documentary aesthetics. This chapter will focus on the more abstract and emotionally intense charcoal drawings used when the protagonist describes events he either did not witness directly, cannot remember fully, or is unable to make sense of. This style, I will demonstrate, is an aesthetic choice that underlines the film’s central themes of precarity and refuge, memory, and identity construction, while shedding light on the use of animation in contemporary fields of non-fiction more generally. The sketched charcoal images are purposely incomplete, suggestive, and embody simultaneous erasure and becoming. By emphasizing partial disclosure of information, and the constructedness of truth claims, animation highlights the fact that not everything is seen or made available. My claim is that in our over-saturated media environment, where animation is increasingly used to simplify and summarize information in digestible and attention-grabbing ways, there is great potential for animation that works differently in animated documentary, animation that requires attention, concentration, and critical spectatorship. The charcoal sketch scenes in Flee are minimalistic, indistinct, and often ambiguous images that form slowly before the viewers’ eyes. As such, this kind of imagery evokes a sense of wonder and creates rare spaces of analytical awareness for the viewer. In all their ambiguity and their evocation of a wonderous form of spectatorship, these images enable to face the protagonist of the film differently, from a position of equality and shared humanity that engenders responsibility and the potential for more ethical spectatorship through empathy and identification.