Animated Documentary: A Dramatic Art of Documentary Storytelling

Animation, unlike live-action, offers much more flexibility to tell a story through enhanced visual as well as aesthetic demonstrations. Besides, the medium can operate in a factual context to represent and document actuality. The current paper attempts to analyze diverse degrees of expressive gradations offered by nonfiction animation medium to document “a dramatized presentation of man's relation to his institutional life" (Spottiswoode, 1959) for the enriched, intense and actual depiction of the true narratives while preserving the spirit of the reality. The researcher situates the current paper in nonfiction animation practice, which is intended to document exacting realities that persist in the form of evocation, experience or memory in one's mind, to contest fact-based animation within the perspectives of re-enactment and reconstruction in documentary storytelling. In this paper, the researcher argues that animation offers enhanced documentation of events which the live-action, in some cases, cannot. Whether Folman's war memoir ‘Waltz with Bashir (2008)' or Mischa Kamp's ‘Naked (2007)', nonfiction animation has played a phenomenal role to give a visual narrative structure to memories, experiences, and the people. The medium, being very rich in its presentation, bids rich exhibition of reality through hand-drawn sketches as in Robbins's ‘Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (2007)' or higher levels of imagination and living art like Landreth's ‘Ryan (2005)', instituting its influence and impact through augmented storytelling.