The Documentary Attraction: Animation, Simulation and the Rhetoric of Expertise

In this chapter Leon Gurevitch discusses computer-generated documentary simulations that function both as spectacular attractions and visual signifiers of expertise and authority. Gurevitch explores the increasing prominence of such images within a variety of documentary contexts since the digital revolution that began during the 1990s. The chapter underscores the extent to which CG-animated documentary spectacles are today routinely encountered within a range of fields, many not readily associated in the popular mind with animated aesthetics, production technologies or histories: military, scientific, architectural and engineering, for example. Gurevitch explains that in the absence of live footage (or even in support of it), animated and simulated spectacle is frequently deployed within documentary film making in the interests of “expertise”. In this sense, CG simulations function to persuade the audience of the time and effort put into making the documentary and therefore act as an index of a given moving image work’s veracity.

Making The Trouble with Love and Sex

This chapter is an autobiographical and critically reflective account of both the making and reception of the first full-length animated documentary made for British television, The Trouble with Love and Sex (2011). The chapter is written by the film’s director, Jonathan Hodgson. The chapter discusses Hodgson’s pre-production concerns regarding animation’s capacity to effectively and engagingly convey subtle nuances of body language on display within emotionally and psychologically complex and challenging spaces (the counselling rooms of Relate, a professional marriage guidance service). The chapter also discusses the highly positive audience response to the finished work, arguing that animated documentary aesthetics and form in fact allowed for notably non-prejudicial, non-judgemental forms of audience engagement with the film’s protagonists. The chapter also discusses at length the pre-production, production, and post-production methodology employed Hodgson and his key collaborators during the making of their film.

‘Does this look right?’ Working Inside the Collaborative Frame

This chapter is written from, and critically examines, the creative and ethical perspectives of animated documentary practitioners. The author, Samantha Moore, focuses particularly on collaboratively ethnographic approaches to, and examples of, animated documentary filmmaking. This chapter asks to what extent the frame within an animated documentary can become a collaborative, co-authored space that creates truly dialogic images. It also enquiries as to how practitioners do or could go about creating, negotiating and sustaining such forms of collaboration. The chapter discusses key examples from the filmmaking practices of the author and her peers, including Shira Avni, who works with the Down syndrome and autistic communities. It does so in order to outline what impacts different forms of collaborative filmmaking approach might have for audience, filmmakers, and documentary subject-participants, especially in the contexts of documentary films that aim to give a voice to marginalised and unrepresented human perspectives.

Indeterminate and Intermediate or Animated Nonfiction: Why Now?

In this chapter Nea Ehrlich proposes that the contemporary fascination with animated documentary stems from animated non-fiction’s challenging of traditionally perceived differences between animation and photography as seminal modern and postmodern visual media. In tandem with the huge proliferation of animated documentaries since 2008, there has also been a significant rise in the creative practice, academic study, and distribution of this medium. This chapter explains why this shift in visual culture is occurring now, and how it shapes viewership. Ehrlich advances a case for understanding animated documentary’s increasing contemporary usage and perceived credibility by exploring the wider context of animation’s use within news media. These range from daily news broadcasts made by the Taiwanese broadcaster Next Media Animation through to investigative short films produced by the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Ehrlich reflects upon different modes of representation that many deem “more real” and believable as legitimate documentation than traditionally privileged photographic and journalistic tools and strategies.

From Contextualisation to Categorisation of Animated Documentaries

This chapter provides a wide-ranging account of animated documentary cinema’s evolution, one which relates that ongoing history to analogous developments in related fields including live-action documentary, painting, photography and New Journalism. By their overt artificial nature animated documentaries seem to challenge the traditional documentary epistemology. Lefèvre considers the extent to which established Film Studies conceptual and analytical paradigms offer pre-existing tools that contemporary scholars can readily transpose to the study of animated documentary. This essay questions if the animated documentaries still fit in the six categories or modes of documentary film production that Bill Nichols defined: the poetic, the expository, the observational, the participatory, the reflexive, and the performative mode. This chapter highlights many of the critical and conceptual questions which that partially obscured history raises, laying out ten distinct sets of logistical, aesthetic and ideological issues that repeatedly manifest themselves across the history of animated documentary filmmaking.

Creative Challenges in the Production of Documentary Animation

In this chapter, Sheila M. Sofian examines animated documentary from a filmmaker’s perspective. This chapter explores the appropriateness of animation’s use within nonfiction film. This chapter also asks how and when animation’s use might enhance audience understanding of a given documentary topic, and how and when it might distract from the same. The chapter also examines whether animation’s use in documentary reveals the filmmaking process in a more overt fashion than witnessed within live action documentary, and what controversies arise as a result. This chapter discusses these and other issues through reflective accounts of the production and exhibition of Sofian’s own animated documentary films. In discussing these works, this chapter examines the creative process of animated documentary production and the unique challenges faced when producing non-fiction animated films. The relationship between sound and image, choice of animation technique, and the effectiveness of literal versus abstract imagery are all topics explored.

The Reasons for Animating Reality: Animated Documentary and Re-enactment in the Work of Jonas Odell

This chapter discusses three animated documentaries by filmmaker Jonas Odell: Never Like the First Time! (2006), Lies (2008), and Tussilago (2010). Comparative analysis establishes many of the criteria against which these films are generally considered to be examples of animated documentary practice. In all three works, documentary audio interviews are integrated as voiceover and form the foundations on which Odell as animator-filmmaker visually “packages” interviewees’ stories in ways that render them more interesting and attractive to audiences. As with many other animated documentaries, Odell’s stylistic and technical choices strike a balance between aesthetic aspiration and documentary responsibility to the sense and meaning of his interviewees’ stories. Odell’s filmmaking choices exemplify animated documentary’s distinctive capacity to translate complex communicational codes and data – for example, interviewees’ experiences of memory, the varied styles of their spoken narrations, and the subjective quality of Odell’s interpretations of their testimonies – into concrete, highly distinctive audio-visual forms.

Memory Drawn into the Present: Waltz with Bashir and Animated Documentary

The international success of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) saw this work routinely defined and discussed as the first feature-length example of animated documentary cinema. This chapter analyses Folman’s film and the multidisciplinary body of scholarly response that it has provoked. Much response to Folman’s film evaluates it in isolation and speculates more ambitiously on animated documentary’s possible aesthetic, conceptual and ethical strengths and weaknesses as a distinctive mode of audio-visual practice. This chapter’s analysis of Folman’s film likewise identifies defining formal and thematic characteristics that drive the contemporary turn towards animated documentary filmmaking more generally. This chapter also identifies several main evolving concepts and debates that characterise animated documentary scholarship as a distinctive subset of Animation Studies and Film Studies. Finally, this chapter also identifies other academic disciplines – such as Memory Studies and Trauma Studies – within which significant discussion of animated documentary is also taking place.

Animated Documentary, Recollection, ‘Re-enactment’ and Temporality

In this chapter Paul Ward focuses particularly on the concept of re-enactment, arguing that it raises varied questions about the nature of performance, agency, point of view and temporality within animated documentary. Ward grounds his theoretical speculations and conceptual distinctions in close readings of two animated documentaries, Andersartig (2011) and The Children of the Holocaust (2014), both of which depict individual childhood memories of living in Nazi-era Germany. He concludes that works such as these encourage audiences and critics alike to understand and engage with animated documentary as a filmmaking mode able to portray intangible, often non-indexical (and therefore un-photographable) documentary phenomena.

Editors’ Introduction

Introducing the collection, this chapter sets the stage for researching animated documentary. The introduction explores how animated imagery, which often assumes obviously artificial, non-indexical visual forms, can be used to communicate the qualities of believability and factuality commonly expected from documentary artefacts. The writers contributing to this book consider the varied kinds of subject matter animation might effectively document, and the extent to which animated documentary reflects and influences contemporary understandings of “reality” and “the real”. The book’s essays present interdisciplinary investigations into the aesthetic, practical, ethical, epistemological, philosophical, technological and political issues associated with animated documentary cinema. Tracing the historical roots of animated documentary and where its future directions might lead, Drawn from Life identifies a range of theoretical and practice-led bases from which animated documentary cinema can be productively understood and reimagined. The book’s sections include Past and Present, Defining Terms and Contexts, and Films and Filmmakers.