Children of the Holocaust

While I may have written about this series a number of times now, I still believe that this series was what properly introduced me into the world of animated documentaries as well as the process (Well roughly at least) behind it.

Children of the Holocaust is an animated documentary series by Fettle Animation that was commissioned by BBC Learning, these shorts focused on the experiences of several different people who experienced the horrific genocide first hand. And so much like Going Equipped, these were actually animations that revolved around live interviews, the difference however was the fact that each short went all out in illustrating what it was that each interviewee actually experienced during their nightmarish ordeal, instead of simply animating the interviewee himself/herself.

Seeing that the documentary focuses on an incredibly dark period, it was interesting to see how Fettle Animation went about properly censoring the shorts so that they would be suitable for the children to view, aside from of course editing and cutting out hours and hours or recordings they had obtained from the interviews down to just 5 minutes each. 

While it is pretty much impossible to completely remove things such as weapons and dead bodies (Though that was only actually shown in just one short, plus they looked like little dollies than real human bodies), I believe that Fettle still did a really decent job in toning most of it down, I suppose it was also the rather cute art style that contributed to that (Truth be told, I found the music to be much more grim that what I actually saw on the screen).

Aside from that, the studio also needed to work alongside an expert when it came to double checking the accuracy of the historical facts that would be presented in the animated shorts, which is big job in itself. And so even before any animating could be done, a lot of editing and research of the source material had to be done first.

Children of the Holocaust as a whole, definitely gets its point across, which is to simply educate the younger generation about one of the world's darkest times, and just how much these people had gone through during then. It is interesting to see how the Holocaust was viewed from several different perspectives instead of one, regardless of how different each situation seemed, they had all lost so much and struggled with what they had as they fought to survive at such a young age.