The handmade and the analogue in animated autobiographies

Traditionally associated with the literature of the last century, the autobiography is a genre that seems versatile enough to find its way among the latest artistic and technological innovations such as video or the graphic novel, and animation, which is of particular interest to us in this book, is no exception. Since the release of the acclaimed Persepolis ( Parronaud & Satrapi, 2007 ) and Waltz with Bashir ( Folman, 2008 ), there has been a growing interest in the personal experience of events, that is, an empirical rather than a journalistic view in animated documentaries. As Cristina Formenti aptly defines, “the main characteristic of nowadays animated documentaries is that they linger more on the feelings and emotions experienced by one or more real-life people rather than on illustrating mere facts concerning them” ( Formenti, 2022 : 65). But this interest in subjective stories even transcends the boundaries of animated documentary; we have observed that numerous films made mostly in the last decade adopt an autobiographical approach but are neither released as documentary nor are they received as such. 1