Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema

Documentary cinema has always drawn from real life, but an increasing number of contemporary filmmakers are going further still, drawing onscreen images of reality through a range of animated filmmaking techniques. Drawn from Life is the first book to explore the field of animated documentaries from a diverse range of scholarly and practice-based perspectives, exploring and proposing answers to a range of questions that preoccupy twenty-first-century film artists and audiences alike: Why use animation to document? How do such images reflect and influence our understanding and experience of reality, whether public or private, psychological or political? From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, this book casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us, challenging the orthodox definitions of documentary cinema.