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.

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol.6 (3)

This was the first extensive attention to animated documentary in an academic journal. It has lots of great articles on many different topics and a really useful introduction written by the editor of the special edition, Jeffrey Skoller.

Sybil DelGaudio, "If Truth Be Told, Can ‘Toons Tell it? Documentary and Animation," Film History, 9(2), 1997, 189-99

One of the first articles published about animated documentary. It focuses more on the history of animated documentaries

Cristina Formenti, "The Sincerest Form of Docudrama: Re-framing the Animated Documentary," Studies in Documentary Film 8(2), 2014, 103-115

Formenti an interesting take on animated documentaries, reading them as a sub-type of the docudrama. As such, her scholarship presents an alternative perspective to that offered in my own work.

Annabelle Honess Roe, "Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary," Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (3), 2011, 215-231

This is an article I wrote that gives an overview of how we might think about animated documentary, including some ways of organising different types of animated documentary into groups.

Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

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.

Annabelle Honess Roe, Kate Nash, Craig Hight, Catherine Summerhayes, "The Evolution of Animated Documentary," New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 174-191

A chapter that considers why there was an increase in production of, and interest around, animated documentaries in the 1990s

Gunnar Strøm, "The Animated Documentary," Animation Journal 11, 2003, 46-63

An early article on animated documentary that, a bit like Del Gaudio, lays out the history of animated docs.

Paul Ward, "Animated Realities: The Animated Film, Documentary, Realism," Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 8(2), 2008

This article discusses animated documentaries in the context of theories of cinematic realism

Paul Wells, “The Beautiful Village and the True Village: A Consideration of Animation and the Documentary Aesthetic,” Art and Animation, 1997, 40-45

Another example of earlier scholarship on animated documentary. In this article, Wells suggests a typology of animated documentaries (that I challenged in my book!)

Orly Yadin, Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, “But is it Documentary?” Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933 (Wallflower, 2005), 168-172

A chapter written by a filmmaker (producer) that presents a convincing case for why animated was the best approach in the documentary she made with Orly Yadin (Silence)