Animated Documentary

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. On behalf of the Society for Animation Studies(SAS), the Chair of the Jury announced the book as the winner of the delayed 2015 SAS McLaren-Lambart Award with the following words: 'Animated Documentary is a vital addition to both animation scholarship and film studies scholarship more broadly, expertly achieving the tricky challenge of synthesising these two scholarly traditions to provide a compelling and brilliantly coherent account of the animated documentary form. At the heart of Roe’s book is the conviction that animated documentary “has the capacity to represent temporally, geographically, and psychologically distal aspects of life beyond the reach of live action” (p. 22). As a representational strategy, Roe details how animated documentary can be seen to adopt techniques of “mimetic substitution, non-mimetic substitution and evocation” in response to the limitations of live action material (p. 26). Animated Documentary will without doubt become an essential resource for many years to come for anyone interested in the intersection of animation and documentary.' 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. Animation and documentary may seem an odd couple, but Animated Documentary shows how the use of animation as a representational strategy for documentary enhances and expands the realm of nonfiction film and television. From prehistory to states of mind, animation can show and evoke things that elude live-action. The current boom in animated documentary production is situated in the historical context of the cross-pollination of animation and documentary, before exploring the different ways animation functions in the animated documentary. Through analyzing films and television programmes such as Waltz With Bashir and Walking With Dinosaurs, this volume - the first to be published on this fascinating topic - demonstrates that while animation might at first seem to destabilize documentary's claim to represent reality, the opposite is in fact the case Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-16 Representational Strategies....Pages 17-40 Digital Realities....Pages 41-73 Animated Interviews....Pages 74-105 The World in Here....Pages 106-138 Animated Memories....Pages 139-169 Afterword....Pages 170-173 Back Matter....Pages 174-194