This blog is about an animation documentary named A is for Autism (Tim Webb 1992).
The documentary A Is for Autism (1992) is directed by Tim Webb. It describes Autistic children and adults sketching out the look and feel of their sensory world in an early awareness-raising film.
According to Honess Roes’s ‘Taxonomy for Documentary’ (2013), Animated Documentary has been recorded or created frame by frame. A Is for Autism is comprised of those and it includes collages of drawings, live-action sequences, and voiceovers that offer an insight into different aspects and forms of autism. Illustrated by collages of drawings, it gives a rare glimpse of the very private and personal worlds of autistic children and adults, their thoughts and feelings, and, especially, their sensory responses to and experiences of the world.
Secondly, Roes argues that documentaries are about the real world rather than a world wholly imagined by its creator. And Webb’s choices in his works to demonstrate the inner worlds of the autistic reflect Rose’s argument. He spent a large amount of time regularly recording the feelings and thoughts of autistic people. Hence, the interview context completely depends on the autistic rather than the director’s subjective thoughts.
Thirdly, presented by the producer as a documentary, A Is for Autism (1992) is underpinned by music made of a flute and a piano, and the assembled sound is edited to help present both individual narratives and the broader picture of the autistic world. The interaction between the sound and the images adds additional layers to a visually dense film, leaving the audience to view it multiple times before fully comprehending its illustrations and associations.
While, in his book Blurred Boundaries, documentary theorist Bill Nichols writes that the documentary ‘is dependent on the specificity of its images for authenticity’ (1994: 29). This documentary film uses the simplicity, uniqueness, and clarity of autistic works to convey the real world of autism. This film relates to the research fields that are more likely to be based on images because it can more specifically illustrate the content and phenomenon. However, Christina Formenti (2014) locates animation documentaries in the realm of docu-fiction due to what she perceives as the lack of objectivity of what we observe on the screen (2014: 108-110). But this movie shows the objective perspective from the real content of autism rather than the subjective comprehension of the director. It is derived from the roles being recorded, while the producer is merely the editor.
In the end, A Is for Autism is more likely to be a documentary because it mainly recorded the experiences of the autism group and it provides opportunities for the ordinary audience to learn about people with autism.