Exploring post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma in adult animation: a comprehensive analysis of Flee, Waltz witn Bashir and L'Image Manquante

Animation has been employed as a productive and subtle means to represent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and historical trauma. The aim of this article is to study the narrative, visual, and psycho-affective strategies of both phenomena through the films Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), and L'Image Manquante (Rithy Panh, 2013). The ability of animated images to reconstruct moments for which there is no visual testimony, as well as their capacity to evoke the experience of traumatic events, emerges as the center of a specific aesthetic approach to history, forming a type of cinema of the real (Zylberman, 2022). Contrary to the tradition of documentary and visual essay, there is a more frequent expressive use of evocative mechanisms, dreamlike images combined with archival material, and forms of re-enactment of real events that necessarily do not involve the use of actors. The evocation of painful experiences establishes a visual framework in which the viewer becomes the epicenter of the affective staging of trauma and PTSD, prioritizing poetic construction.