Film Review of I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Ann Marie Fleming based on Bernice Einsenstein's memoir

 I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is director Ann Marie Fleming’s animated film based on Bernice Eisenstein’s illustrated memoir. The film depicts the main character’s life experience and family members’ traumatic experience through Holocaust. A broad variety of sophisticated life topics, including human nature, life cycle, traditional ritual, collective behaviors, are covered through the film. The voice over narrator of the film is Bernice Eisenstein, who represents the main character, a Jewish girl who grows up in a community where her grandparents, parents, relatives, and friends of her parents all share the same pain and loss from Holocaust. The film is a 2D animation combining both cut out and hand drawn characters, rendered in After Effects. A large chunk of the animation uses only black, white, and gray to fill the screen, yet colors are also introduced when there are important motifs, memories or objects, such as the girl’s mother’s golden wedding ring. Match cut and metamorphosis are two major editing methods used for most transitions between scenes.  In certain scenes, Fleming also applies multi-frames as a unique visual cut to create a stronger impact. When the main character falls, instead of seeing her fall once, we see her fall three times in three separated frames in the same cut. Cycle, is one strongest motif appeared in the film. We see cycle in the film visually represented as a circular shape for several objects, such as a wedding ring, a ripple on the lake, a round cookie, the family dinning table, and a rolling snowball. This motif is not only shown through visual illustration, but also embedded through the storyline. The story starts with the girl’s father’s death and ends with the girl’s son’ birth. The newborn inherits the girl’s father’s name, labeling a meaningful rebirth of life and love.
I enjoy watching this film a lot, especially for its well-designed plot, unrevealing a series of unbelievably complicated events, personal stories, and powerful emotions. The story is huge, and the time span of the characters’ experiences is long, yet the Fleming has done a very successful job by compressing all that rich elements into a short animated film while keeping a sense of humor to connect with the audience. I feel I can learn a lot from this film. My grad film also deals with real-life experience, which is about a young Caucasian enters China and encounters both evil and good nature of people. My film is still at the beginning stage, where storyboard has not even been settled down. So far from the class critique, my biggest issue with my grad project is that I am not decisive enough from cutting unnecessary scenes from the original stories. Also, my way of depicting the story is very straight forward, and it loses the power of poetic storytelling in animation. I am working on that part a lot. By viewing Fleming’s work, I learned a lot about how free animation expression could be, and I am thinking of trying some brave editing techniques for the visuals, such as metamorphosis and match cut in my newer version of storyboard to test if the storyline could be more condensed. Also, the narrator’s one-person narration and sometimes playing as other characters’ voices, which supports the entire dialogue of the stories, attracts me for its impressive connection created between the audience and the film. One-person narration is certainly an efficient audio method for sound production process. My story does have a narrator, but I was not sure before about asking the voice over actor to play both male and female roles in the story. Maybe I am very factual, and have not really learned much about open, bold, and free expression. Fleming’s work encourages and provokes my urge to try something new this time for my way of thinking as a storyteller, instead of as a person who just copies the happened fact.