Animated Documentary, the first book to be published on this fascinating topic, considers how animation is used as a representational strategy in nonfiction film and television and explores the ways animation expands the range and depth of what documentary can show us about the world.
Animated documentaries were first written about (by animation, film and documentary scholars) in the late 1990s. Much of that work was about drawing attention to the existence of animated documentary and discussing how they fit in with pre-existing ideas of what documentary is. It was about 10 years later that scholars once again became interested in animated documentary and from that time there has been an increasing amount of books, articles and book chapters published on the topic. Hopefully this is a sign that the discourse around animated documentaries will continue to develop with new perspectives being offered.
This is the first (and only, to date) single-authored book on animated documentary. It suggests that thinking about animation as a ‘representational strategy’ for documentary can help us think about what animation can do that live action documentary can’t. It looks at different types of animated documentary and ultimately argues that animation broadens and deepens the range of what documentary can show us.