Funny Animals?
The question I’ve always had about Maus is why tell the story through animals. I assumed that this would in some way lessen the impact of the story. It was millions of people who died in the Holocaust, not mice. Would making the humans animals fall into stereotypes? or dehumanize the characters? Was Spiegelman creating an oversimplified fable? Was it not just the the idea of animals that was bothering me, but that the story was being told in a comic book? As soon as I started reading those concerns vanished, but why?
I looked up Maus in the Tropes website that I linked to last week and as the site suggests, In Maus “people are all portrayed as Funny Animals. Except they’re not funny. At all.” As they explain, “Funny Animals” is the use of animals in comics to represent humans. The animal characters don’t particularly carry the animal’s traits. I’m not sure exactly what to do with this information, but it does have a name. But why is this such an effective way to tell this particular story?
I was listening to Slate.com’s Culture Gabfest podcast a few weeks ago and one of the hosts was talking about the power of an animated documentary she had seen recently (can’t remember what it was. . . ). One of the other hosts also mentioned the animated movie Waltz with Bashir in the conversation. The gist was that in a documentary or fiction that deals with moments in history the viewer is often skeptical of reenacted footage. Obvious examples would be bad history channel docs that create high drama scenes with historical characters in costumes. Even when it’s well done, you know that the scene is a recreation and it’s hard to trust. Sometimes you need those scenes though. With an animated version the fact that it’s a reenactment is so obvious and built in that there is no pretending that this is the real thing. I saw Chicago 10 a couple of years ago, and was impressed. It combined actual footage plus recently released audio from the Chicago 7 trial with animation over the real courtroom audio.
Still thinking on this.
