‘Flee’ is a 2021 Danish animated documentary drama by Jonas Poher Rasmussen that follows the story of a man named Amin Nawabi, who shares his hidden past for the first time, fleeing his country.
This may be one of the best films of 2021 as it won World Cinema grand jury prize at Sundance and could become the first feature film to secure academy award nominations in categories of best international feature (for Denmark) and documentary and animated feature. Flee is also a contender for a best picture nomination, which, for a documentary, would be an Oscar first.
THE MAKING
Art and theme should match in making a documentary most especially if it’s a harrowing tale of a refugee. The creative team behind the Sun Creator Studio include: animation director Kenneth Ladekjær, art director Jess Nicholls, and character designer Mikkel Sommer.
Since the team needed to secure anonymity, they have to familiarize themselves with created animated iterations of Amin and his family through photos. They opted to push for a less cartoon-ish aesthetic for the documentary to become raw and for it to complement the narrative.
HAND-DRAWN STYLE
Since Amin is talking about his childhood up to present, they had to come up with a series of motion drawings to portray the different stages of their lives. The character designer had to consider the emotional state knowing the difference between his life in Kabul and the moment they fled to Moscow.
The key success to get the emotional appeal through the drawings is when you design facial features and postures that tell a lot of story.
EXPERIENCE
There was a mix of live-action videos from war and snippets of voices in the interviews. Amin requested that he remain anonymous and Ladekjær animated the interview shots himself. The goal of the animators was to not filter reality that’s why they valued connection so much.
THE TEAM
The core team behind Flee’s animation consisted of 10 animators and 10 cleanup artists in Denmark, a team of coloring artists from France. They all went through screening processes by navigating the scenes itself.
They gave importance to the brushworks that’s supposed to be inky and sketchy that it would look like as if it was a graphic novel. They did experiment on how this would look like from trying charcoal on paper, scanning, but they got it digitized later on.
The team also involved people from Afghanistan who also fled to Denmark like what Amin did. They were there to watch the animated series and how it was being made to make judgment, to put off the wrongs, and for them to stay in the realism side—staying true to every piece of it.
CONCLUSION
This is the power of the animation. We literally got to know a heartbreaking story of one refugee to another by simply retelling it while keeping anonymity in the most creative way possible.
People were forced to flee their homes and telling this story is a testimony that it happens all over the world.
