Animated Realities in India: Documenting Using Documentary Animation – An Analysis

The animation is an expressive medium that can do all the genres in its own unique style that live action can do (Brad Bird, 2015). Broadly speaking, animation operates in two contexts - fiction and nonfiction. Known for its massive outsourcing of animation projects, India also owns a gigantic amount of indigenous animation production. Though fictional animation based on the animator's imagination accounts for huge contribution to the industry, nonfiction animation, based on reality, is also able to find some space within the industry. This paper attempts to analyze the trajectory of nonfiction animation employed in the context of Indian documentary films. The nonfiction animation is mostly used for documentary purposes and the Indian documentarists have started using the animation for the in-depth depiction of their arguments. The methodological approach of the study involves the analysis of a few Indian documentaries that used animation in one way or the other as a narrative strategy followed by the insights made by the documentarists in context to the animation used.