My literature review will span across these various different categories in regards to the animated documentary: Enactment and re-enactment, interview and its relationship to animated documentary and empathetic engagement. Scanning and assessing these works should assist in the exploration of animated documentaries’ viewer engagement.
Enactment and Re-enactment
The most essential and key authors’ work which will engage this are the works of Honess Roe and Bill Nichols’s expansion on the ‘Fantasmatic’ subject when discussing documentary. He regards this with a case study about Mighty Times: The Children’s March (Houston, 2004) which arose controversial opinions due to its near imperceptible recreated live-action footage with historically archived footage (2008). This can be similarly contrasted with Honess Roe’s account of using Chicago 10 (Morgern, 2007), use of motion capture to create contradistinction between the archival footage and the motion-captured, computer-generated imagery used in the recreation.
Interview
An essential part of gaining perspective on the subjective documentary will be the investigation of the animated interview. This may perhaps be one of the most important sections to consider for my thesis. Key author for this section will include Judith Krieger, Paul Ward, Paul Wells, Honess Roe and Nea Ehrlich as they investigate various different cases of animated interview and issues surrounding them. A key example of this is the comparison of Its Like That (Southern Ladies Animation Group, 2003) to Slaves (2008) in their utilization of childrens audio with different aesthetic choices. There is also the aspect of criminal anonymity found in both Going Equipped (Lord, 1990) and Some Protection (Rimminen, 1987) as they potentially are more effective in animated form as they create a confessional aspect for the interviewees.
Empathetic Engagement
Assessing the relevant neuroscientific papers such as Patrick Powers ‘Character Animation and the Embodied Mind—Brain’ will help ground an understanding of how humans perceive animated bodies on an empathetic level and gain an insight into areas such as the ‘mirror neuron system’. This will be essential to ultimately analyse my survey findings later on at the end process of my thesis.
Bibliography Regarding the Literature Review
Ehrlich, N (2013) Animated Documentaries: Aesthetics, Politics and Viewer Engagement in: Buchan, S., eds. Pervasive animation. New York [etc.]: Routledge, pp.248-268.
Grierson, J. (1933) ‘The Documentary Producer,’ Cinema Quarterly, Vol 2. No. 1, Pp. 7–9.
Honess Roe, A. (2013). Animated Documentary. Palgrave Macmillan: BasingStoke, UK.
Kriger, J. (2012). Animated Realism: A Behind-the-scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre. Focal Press: Oxford, UK.
Nichols, B. (1991), ‘Representing Reality: issues and Concepts in Documentary’. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Power, P. (2008) ‘Character Animation and the Embodied Mind—Brain’, Qualitative Health Research, 3(1), pp. 1518–1533. doi: 10.1177/10497323211012384.
Ward, P. (2007). ‘Animated Interactions: Animation Aesthetics and the World of the ‘Interactive’ Documentary’. In: Buchan, S.(ed.) Animated’ Worlds’. New Barnet: John Libbey & Company, Limited.