Fantasy and propaganda define the new crop of docs beloved by cultural elites.
The catastrophe that is contemporary journalism is perfectly illustrated by Flee, a Danish film that poses as both a documentary and animated feature. This confusion is literally illustrated — director Jonas Poher Rasmussen uses a visual style that evokes the crowd-pleasing sentimentality of Pixar, Miyazaki anime, and the classic rotoscope A-ha music video “Take On Me.”
Flee takes the true-life refugee story of Afghan Amin Nawabi, now a Princeton-university academic, and submits it to techniques of editorializing persuasion (animation combined with actual news footage). Such subjective methods reveal the narrative-making license that has overwhelmed contemporary media so that news and reporting are now unreliable if not impossible.
It’s difficult to separate Nawabi’s story, which looks like flights of fantasy, from the seriousness of family memories: his father imprisoned as a threat to Communists, the Mujahideen; his older brother’s departure in the ’80s; then the rest of the family’s inopportune escape to Moscow, a year after the fall of Communism. From there, they endure international trafficking to Denmark, a nightmare visualized like a low-budget version of Disney’s Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia.
Animation sentimentalizes history and makes its complex contradictions too easily assimilated — a childish approach that is convenient for progressives. (Nawabi’s narration never critiques the Taliban’s fascism or, more personally, its homophobia.) That’s why the recent distortion of political documentaries has won so much acclaim. Flee follows the variously corrupt paths of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007), Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), and Joshua Oppenheimer’s especially noisome The Act of Killing (2012). After the chaos ignited by Michael Moore mockumentaries, Flee continues the slant toward editorializing history and truth.
Flee has received multiple Oscar nominations in three categories — Best Documentary, Best International Film, and Best Animated Film — a precedent that confirms Hollywood’s confusion about genre and about truth. As in daily journalism, the confusion is also a matter of political and cultural prejudice. The migrant narrative preoccupies European filmmakers, from Flee’s Rasmussen to Gianfranco Rosi (Fire at Sea), and has become a mainstay at international film festivals where liberal worldviews dominate — as though these festivals were extensions of Oxfam, Global Citizen, and Amnesty International.
Foreign politics are enormously appealing to guilt-ridden Westerners. Rasmussen’s sympathies are blatant when he shows Mohammad Najibullah, the former president of Afghanistan, predicting that “when the U.S. provides weapons for terrorists, Afghanistan could well become a second Vietnam for the U.S. instead!” Here, Rasmussen intercuts color news footage with animation. It works only because film reviewers, like Hollywood Academy members, tend to be political naïfs — but always liberal.
Despite winning Hollywood’s approval, Nawabi’s sentimentality is inconveniently timed for the Biden administration. (“We fled to Moscow, a year after the fall of Communism. People are starving and the supermarkets are empty. The ruble keeps devaluing, and they keep printing new money.”) Yet Flee doesn’t stand as allegory; its politics are simpler, animated toward promoting Nawabi’s sexual “secret.” Details of his Westernization — the process of achieving elitism — are overlooked because that triumph is also implicit in the animation process itself.
I was instantly put off Flee because of its immediate glibness. The A-ha video style (rotoscoping involves pencil sketches of live action, tracing over the film footage frame by frame) alters truth and perception. It takes us further away from the necessary realism of documentaries that present fact, what Dziga Vertov called “life caught unaware.” Flee epitomizes how our information stream suffers from the combination of fantasy and propaganda.
