Visualizing Reproductive Fear: Linking Body Metaphors To Traumatic Emotions In The Experimental 2D Animation Born (2024)
Experimental animation often employs metamorphosis and incorporates visual metaphors as strategies to explore concepts such as the cycle of historical trauma, thereby contributing to the transmission of collective memories related to colonialism, apartheid, and war. (Stewart 2024, 7). These transformations not only signify external historical ruptures but also mirror internal emotional upheavals. In this context, the body emerges as a crucial site of expression, metaphorically becoming a space through which the intensity of emotion can be measured (Kövecses 2000, 24). This provides a solid theoretical basis for using the body to express abstract traumatic emotions in experimental animation.
My animated short film, Born (Sun 2024), is an artistic response to the discipline of contemporary women's bodies and the kidnapping of social expectations. It visualizes the abstract concept of female reproductive trauma and attempts to explain women's anxiety and uneasiness about reproduction. Inspiration for the film’s narrative stems from the often overlooked issue of "routine" childbirth. In medical and social discourse, childbirth is often simplified as a natural process, ignoring the psychological trauma and identity fission that can follow. Research on reproductive trauma group therapy has found that the physical injuries women suffer during pregnancy, traumatic childbirth, and after "routine" childbirth can trigger nightmares, including flashbacks of childbirth, numbness, anger, depression, and a strong sense of isolation (Born et al 2005, 67). Therefore, Born attempts to "visualize" these often romanticized, silent, and suppressed experiences and use the language of animation to construct a traumatic and cathartic space where the body and mind overlap. Using animation art to recreate traumatic events is to acknowledge and reveal the gap between reality and its appearance (Gyenge, 2021), and as this blog post identifies Born aims to make the viewer aware of the gap between real pain and idealised peace, and to trigger greater thinking about this gap.
Trauma Theory link Body Metaphor
Van der Kolk (1998), a famous trauma theory researcher, believes that traumatic memory is easily distorted, fragmented, and difficult to recall. Such ideas provide a basis for the nonlinear narrative structure in Born. In addition, animation can embrace strategies of surrealism to transfer trauma to concrete objects (Nemnom 2021) to convey its emotions in a visual way. In Born, traumatic emotions are expressed through figurative distortions of the body and the instability of the animated environment. In addition, the injection of metaphorical symbols within the film gives symbolic meaning to physiological structures such as reproductive organs, such as the pelvis, vulva, and uterus, making it possible to visualise them as carriers of reproductive trauma. Secondly, the captivity narrative theory from Stephanie A. Smith (2016) provides a structural framework for the concept of the entire animation. This narrative is combined with the image of the umbilical cord being metaphorically used as a constraint and suggesting the mother's social or psychological imprisonment in the context of reproductive fear.
Fig. 1 - Reproductive imagery composed of surreal objects in Born (Yixin Sun, 2024).
Reproductive Symbol
Born draws inspiration from the visual strategy of Sujin Kim’s 3D animation Unforgotten (2021), which employs a metaphorical environment to depict the sexual violence endured by “comfort women”—women who were forcibly exploited as sexual slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II to maintain soldier morale. While Born addresses a different kind of “routine” reproductive trauma, it similarly translates emotional pain into surreal imagery, embedding it within reproductive symbols rendered as plant-like forms.In Born,as the distorted face symbolizing inner trauma is torn by the umbilical cord, the flower mouth in the body world is revealed. Then, the flower mouth opens, revealing and flowing more blood (Fig. 1). Here, the animator gives the signifier the meaning of the flower mouth and blood the metaphorical meaning of the morning sickness mouth and episiotomy. The flower mouth is smiling, but it is accompanied by twitching and groaning, and also by pain. Flowers can symbolically refer to female external genitalia (Frownfelter 2010), while Freud believed that the slender shape often represents the male phallus (Obinyan 2014, 3). The two form a highly suggestive reproductive image. Next, a long-fertilized egg extends downward like a tree root. Until a female pregnant body is revealed, then it transforms into a cocoon, metaphorically becoming a rotting flesh shell that envelops new life (Fig. 1).
Fig. 2 - Dreaming of Peculiar Creatures (Nathani Lüneburg, 2014).
Fig. 3 - The umbilical cord torning the mother’s spirit in Born.
Reproductive Shackles and Captivity Narrative
The Captivity Narrative demonstrates that the Prometheus symbol, who represents the continuation of life imprisoned by his own eternal “rotting flesh,” is often described in Western culture as a passive and fallen feminine quality (Smith 2016, 56). This bounded concept is constantly concretized in Born, responding to this imprisonment with female body organs. In Dreaming of Peculiar Creatures (Nathani Lüneburg, 2014), Lüneburg uses the image of the umbilical cord as an object (Fig. 2) that imprisons the baby (presented as a young woman). In Born, the umbilical cord is associated with the organs that imprison the mother, providing a combination of shackles (umbilical cord) and flesh (organ) images for the animation’s visual metaphor to emphasize the body (fertility subject)’s bondage to the spirit (female object). Therefore, the umbilical cord continues to pull the mother's soul as a visual thought of cognition of pregnancy (Fig. 3); it will also serve as a carrier of the fertilized egg, pulling and binding the parts of the mother's body that are usually affected by pregnancy and childbirth, such as the breasts, pelvis, vulva and mouth (Fig. 4). As the umbilical cord morphs wildly, the organs are imprisoned in various scenes. Nevertheless, the mother's soul still constantly tries to break free from the imprisonment, interpreting the meaning of the mother trying to get rid of the moral and reproductive fears that imprison her.
Fig. 4 - Umbilical cord imprisoned the pelvis in Born.
Body Metamorphosis and Flash Frame Technique
Born also combines metamorphosis and flash frame technique to present scenes where the mother's soul tries to break out of imprisonment. This non-linear visual narrative method aims to simulate the flashback of traumatic memories, which are constantly changing and fragmented. These memories, represented by reproductive organs, quickly and gradually transform into each other (Fig. 5). A similar example appears in The Hat (1999) by Michèle Cournoyer, a 2D animation following a young exotic dancer confronting suppressed childhood sexual abuse. A haunting hat symbolizes her abuser’s lingering presence and acts as a recurring trigger for traumatic memories. Where the twisted deformation shows the fusion of the dancer's torso and the abuser's sexual organs (Fig. 6), expressing the painful situation in which the subject cannot separate and escape from the reproductive fear brought about by sexual trauma. Memory fragments flash like cut pieces (Culbertson 1995, 169), and traumatic memories cannot be evoked in a normal way (Van Der Kolk et al 1998). Therefore, in order to simulate this phenomenon, Born adds some fast and repeated flash frames after the deformation, and forms a visually difficult to recall impression with extremely short frame skipping time.
Fig. 5 - Rapid morphing of reproductive organs in Born.
Fig. 6 - The fusion of the dancer’s childhood and the sexual organs in The Hat (Michèle Cournoyer, 1999).
Conclusion
In the creative process, Born does not seek resolution, Instead, it creates a space where trauma speaks—where reproductive fear is not only personal, but a collective, deeply felt reality. The body in the animation no longer maintains a natural and stable physiological structure, but constantly morphs, merges, and splits, becoming a "traumatic" experience field pulled by emotions. By reshaping and recontextualizing the female form, this film goes beyond simple healing and aims to seek visibility, bringing hidden things into the light. Animation is not only a narrative tool but also a powerful means to explore complex emotional experiences and modern social structures. Therefore, the film hopes to break people's inherent perceptions of women's bodies and fertility, and arouse people's attention to types of "invisible trauma."
**Article published: June 20, 2025**
References
Born, Leslie, Shauna Dae Phillips, Meir Steiner, and Claudio N. Soares. 2005. "Trauma & the reproductive lifecycle in women." Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry 27. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1516-44462005000600006
Culbertson, Roberta. 1995. "Embodied memory, transcendence, and telling: Recounting trauma, re-establishing the self." New Literary History 26 (1):169-195. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/24217/summary
Frownfelter, Andrea. 2010. "Flower symbolism as female sexual metaphor."Open Access Senior Honors Thesis, Art, Eastern Michigan University.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2000. Metaphor and emotion : language, culture, and body in human feeling. 1 ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Obinyan, Valentine Ehichioya. 2014. " FUNDAMENTAL IMPLICATIONS OF SIGMOND FREUD'S DREAM ANALYSIS." Science Journal of Psychology.
Reeh-Peters, Christine, Stefan W. Schmidt, and Peter Weibel. 2021. The Real of Reality: the Realist Turn in Contemporary Film Theory. Boston, UNITED STATES: BRILL.
Smith, Stephanie A. 2016. "‘An Empire O’er the Disentangled Doom’." Science Fiction Film & Television 9 (1):55-72. doi: doi:10.3828/sfftv.2016.3.
Stewart, Michelle. 2024. "Posthumous Portraits in Motion: Experimental Animation, Metamorphosis and Reflections on Mortality." Animation 19 (1):6-26. doi: 10.1177/17468477241233480.
Van Der Kolk, Bessel A. 1998. "Trauma and memory." Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 52 (S1):S52-S64. doi: https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1819.1998.0520s5S97.x.
Biography
Yixin Sun is a Melbourne-based animator and designer whose work explores emotional and social themes through visual storytelling. After completing her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from the University of Technology Sydney, Yixin further explored how motion design and animation can be used as powerful tools for expression. Whilst concurrently completing her Master’s of Animation, Games, and Interactivity at RMIT University, Yixin is collaborating with Psoriasis Australia to create a series of short films titled, “Different On The Outside, But The Same On The Inside”, which aim to raise awareness about various skin conditions.