And We Were Young

Overview

And We Were Young is a stop-motion, silhouette-animation oral history of American soldiers, 'Doughboys,' in the last months of the Great War. Missoula, Montana animator Andy Smetanka cut thousands of paper figures and colored backgrounds and filmed them one frame at a time, on a Soviet-era Super 8 camera, over the course of three years to produce a brutal, hauntingly beautiful, and thoroughly original vision of America's war, narrated entirely in the words of the ones who were there.