Animated Documentaries

Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania is a silent movie created in 1918 animated to portray the 1915 sinking of RMS Lusitania after it was struck by two torpedoes fired from a German U-boat; an event of which no recorded film footage is known to exist. It was the very first recognised example of animated documentary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animated_documentary

Walt Disney’s Victory Through Air Power (1943) is a feature film based on the 1942 book Victory Through Air Power by Alexander P. de Seversky. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power_(film)

Mock-Documentaries- Creature Comforts!

Edward introduced me to these and I love them! They are so funny.

“Creature Comforts is a stop motion clay animation comedy mockumentary franchise originating in a 1989 British humorous animated short film of the same name. The film describes how animals feel about living in a zoo, featuring the voices of the British public “spoken” by the animals. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations. The film later became the basis of a series of television advertisements for the UK electricity boards, and in 2003 a television series in the same style was released. An American version of the series was also made.”

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_Comforts).

Animated Documentaries

For the animation as non-storytelling presentation, I started to have a look at the book, Animated Realism: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre, and I found information on an animator called Paul Fierlinger and researched some of his work.

(Kriger, Judith. Animated Realism. Oxford: Focal, 2012. Print.).

“Their cartoons are set to a “soundtrack” of recorded interviews with real people who tell their personal tales of alienation and melancholy and the epiphanies they achieved. The stories include that of Domingo D’Achille who recalls how lost his sense of his true self in his teens, amassed and squandered a great fortune, lived a skid-row existence for a time, and found peace one night when realized he was just as insignificant and just as important “as the next speck of stardust.” Most powerfully, perhaps because he is so well known and successful, there is film director Milos Forman’s candid remembrance of the loneliness he experienced after the bizarre death of his closest companion, a beloved dog, and how in his grief and denial he played solitaire for hours on end.” (http://www.peabodyawards.com/award-profile/a-room-nearby).

My personal favourite of his pieces would be Still Life With Animated Dogs. It’s about the dogs Paul Fierlinger has owned and how they helped shape his evolution as a man and an artist. We meet Roosevelt, Ike, Johnson, and Spinnaker, all of whom share journey’s and experiences, shown in this animation, from Paul’s 40 years of despair and wonder.

http://thebark.com/content/still-life-animated-dogs

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/animateddogs/story.html