Applied Animation 2 - Animated Documentaries

The animated documentary is a genre of film which combines the genres of animation and documentary. Normally such a genre would be used for topics that are too difficult too visualise, even in real ilife.

Documentary mode is a conceptual scheme developed by American documentary theorist Bill Nichols that seeks to distinguish particular traits and conventions of various documentary film styles. Nichols identifies six different documentary 'modes' in his schema:

Poetic Mode
Subjective Interpretations to the Subject with Little Dialogue
Expository Mode
The Voice Over/Authoritative Voice/ Rhetoric (Think David Attenborough)
Observational Mode
 'Simply Observing' - Not Interpreting - Fly on the Wall (Late 60s and 70s)
Reflexive Mode 
The Documentary is aware of itself or process
Performative Mode 
The 'Director" is in the middle of the subject (Think Michael Moore)

The first recognised example of this genre is Winsor McCay's 1918 "The Sinking of the Lusitania", which uses animation to portray the 1915 sinking of RMS Lusitania after it was struck by two torpedoes fired from a German U-oat; an event which no recorded film footage is known to exist.

Since the 1920s, animation has been used in educational and social guidance films, and has often been used to illustrate abstract concepts in mainly live-action examples of these genres. Early examples of fully animated educational films are Walt Disney's "Victory Though Air Power" and "How to Catch a Cold" (I actually really liked that one as a kid!) and Max and Dave Fleischer's "Evolution".

"Charley Says" was a series of very short cut-out animated cartoon public information films for children, produced by the British government's Central Office of Information and broadcast in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the topics dealt with everyday safety issues children tend to face, such as not going off with strangers or not playing with matches. They featured a little boy called Tony and his cat Charley, who would meow the lesson of the episode, which Tony would then translate and explain.

Despite its good intentions, we definitely cannot help but find this more entertaining than enlightening, and not in a particularly good way, perhaps this is due to the somewhat odd animation style, or the way that cat meows... Either way, it has definitely paved the way to slightly better PSAs as time went on.

And this is not one of them:

As wonderfully humorous and entertaining as "Creature Comforts" is, seeing that the interviews are re-contextualised, is it then still considered a Documentary? Unlike "War Story" (Another work by Aardman Animation), "Creature Comforts" is done for the benefit of humour and is completely out of its original context. 

So, in what point is something no longer considered a documentary? A documentary is meant to inform and educate, but if the information obtained is used for a different purpose (Again, to be merely used as a joke), I suppose this is where we draw the line and simply see it as nothing more than a piece of entertainment (Ouch, I didn't want this to come out so harsh...), though I am sure that people might be able to better appreciate it, and once they have a good chuckle or two, can look further into these 'interviews' that had been used for it.

There were a lot more examples shown during last week's presentation aside from these, but I wish to save them so that I can write about them as part of the 5 research blog posts that we need to do on animated documentaries. 

So expect some slightly more serious examples  later on!