To be clear, the animation is beautiful, but the story here at times works more in spite of the creative choices being made instead of because of them. “The medium is the message” generally feels no truer than it does when it comes to animated documentaries, but Flee, particularly in comparison to some of its cohorts, does not always take full advantage of the medium to further its message. The film begins with Amin defining home - “somewhere safe… it’s not someplace temporary” - and spends just long enough exploring Amin’s childhood home to make its subsequent destruction and the sense of loss that permeates the rest of the film, fully effective.įlee is a perfect story to tell as an animated documentary, but it somewhat frustratingly fails to truly use the animation in a particularly effective way. Amin, now a scholar living in Denmark with his fiancé, recounts his childhood in Kabul, ended prematurely by civil war and his father’s disappearance at the hands of the Mujahideen, his subsequent escape to Russia, and his long and grueling road to finding any sense of home or belonging again. Like many animated documentaries, the story is a deeply personal one narrated by a series of conversations between Rasmussen and his friend and former schoolmate Amin, an Afghan refugee (name changed along with several others to preserve anonymity). Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee is no exception to this general rule, and for good reason. Rare, but remarkably prestigious from Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir to Keith Maitland’s Tower, the handful of titles that do exist are an incredibly accoladed bunch. But the truly animated documentary-that is, a documentary that is overwhelmingly or entirely animated-is a rare breed, particularly in the feature-length space. Plenty of documentaries use animation as a tool, for embellishment and explanation, to supplement archival footage and talking heads, or to graphically illustrate a concept.
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