Abstract
This chapter examines animated documentaries from the perspective of “conceptual blending theory” (CBT), a model derived from cognitive semantics, demonstrating its potential to explain how filmmakers conceive, and how spectators experience and interpret this idiosyncratic documentary form. The analysis focuses on the Colombian animated documentary Pequeñas Voces (Little Voices) (Jairo Eduardo Carrillo and Óscar Andrade 2011), addressing the interaction between the real characters’ voices from interviews (children displaced during armed conflicts) and the animated interpretations of these characters. Extending the relevance of the CBT model to narrative considerations, such as point-of-view, the concept of “narrative spaces” is also introduced to examine how the film establishes a blend between the focal strategies of fiction film with those of documentary film.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, the autobiographical docudrama Approved for Adoption (Laurent Boileau and Jung Henin 2012), and Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen 2007).
- 2.
Some authors have also focused on general cinematic issues from a CBT perspective. For instance, Todd Oakley (2013) has reinterpreted cinematic apparatus theory by applying one of the developments of CBT, the so-called “Aarhus model”; and more recently, Christian Quendler’s (2014, p. 56) entry on “Blending and Film Theory” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory points to the role of “blending as a meta-theoretical framework for studying inferential structures in theorizing about cinema.” Also, in contrast to David Bordwell (1985) for whom the viewer’s cognitive activity is a purely rational process based on inferences, I have proposed CBT as an alternative way of addressing this activity, in which imagination plays a central role (Conde 2014).
- 3.
- 4.
CBT identifies fifteen vital relations: Change, Identity, Time, Space, Cause-Effect, Part-Whole, Representation, Role, Analogy, Disanalogy, Property, Similarity, Category, Intentionality and Uniqueness (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, pp. 93–102).
- 5.
In some cases (as in the so-called “nested narratives”), the MN-Space may profile its own narrator(s); however, it usually relies “entirely on the SV-space structure” (Dancygier 2012, p. 63).
- 6.
According to Scott Curtis (1992), the traditional distinction between voices, sound effects and music does not work when describing the aural dimension of cartoon films. He particularly mentions the fact that in animated films music can produce sound effects or the character’s voices become “noises”. Pequeñas voces also blends these two sound-design strategies.
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Conde Aldana, J.A. (2018). Little Voices and Big Spaces: Animated Documentary and Conceptual Blending Theory. In: Brylla, C., Kramer, M. (eds) Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90332-3_3
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