Flee: Sounds of Fright and Flight

Animation and live-action are two closely related media, which are foremost distinguished by the ideas and conventions surrounding them. The diverging discourses around animation and live action have tended to focus on animation as something constructed to represent characters and settings and on live action as something capturing actors and sets representing characters and settings. This difference between constructing and capturing, along with the perceived indexicality of the photo, is what seems to suggest live action as the preferred medium for documenting real events. Sound effects, in the form of recorded and edited sounds of objects, actions and environments, are of particular interest here, as they can be considered to balance somewhere between these poles of construction and capture, between the non-indexical and indexical, and ultimately between representation and reproduction. In this article, I will focus on aspects of ‘truth’ (understood as corresponding to some external reality) and ‘realism’ (understood as a representation of external reality) and how something comes to be perceived as truthful or realistic in animated documentaries in relation to the role played by sound effects. By discussing the Danish film Flugt [Flee], I will show how sound effects can aid in creating representations of truth.