Flying While Fat Documentary Animation
Flying While Fat is a six-minute documentary animation built on original research I carried out during my undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Media at Goldsmiths, University of London, later produced in collaboration with Professor Bethan Evans at the University of Liverpool. It centres the lived experiences of plus-size air passengers, a subject heavily covered in the media but almost always in ways that reduce fat people to a problem for others rather than listening to them directly.
The film is unscripted. Every voice in it is real, drawn from interviews and used with each participant’s permission, set against ambient airport sound I recorded on my own travels. That choice is the whole point of the piece: rather than talking about a marginalised group, it lets people speak for themselves, with honesty, intelligence and a striking vulnerability. Letting research participants speak in their own voice is the heart of my animation work with academics and researchers.
The response was extraordinary. The animation premiered at Liverpool’s Deaf and Disability Arts Festival (DaDaFest) and was exhibited at Tate Liverpool and the Bluecoat, the city’s centre for contemporary arts. On release it was picked up by People, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, Mashable, Upworthy, the Daily Mail, the Matador Network and BBC Radio, and was even shared by George Takei, placing the topic in front of an estimated two million readers within the first two weeks.
The work also became scholarship in its own right. The underlying study drew on around 795 survey responses and more than 28 interviews, a significantly larger body of data than any previous research on the subject. It went on to inform two peer-reviewed journal articles I co-authored with Professor Bethan Evans and Dr Rachel Colls: “The Dys-appearing Fat Body: Bodily Intensities and Fatphobic Sociomaterialities when Flying While Fat” in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2021), and “‘Getting in and going’: Access to onboard toilets for fat and disabled people on commercial aircraft” in Geoforum (2024). It’s a project I’m enormously proud of: it began as my own research and grew into public media, gallery exhibition and academic publication all at once.
If you’re a researcher or organisation working on body politics, disability, social justice or any subject where lived experience deserves to be heard, and you’d like to turn research into animation, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.