Animated Documentary Essay

Introduction
By many, animated documentary is considerate a new expression, or evolution, of the documentary, even if this genre (if it can be called so) is been around since the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the firsts examples were short animations such as Winsor McCay’s 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania or the propagandistic cartoons made during the World War I by John Randolph Bay, one of the pioneers of educational animation, who used it as a teaching tool for the US army training.
Historically, animation has been mainly used as an instrument for children’s entrainment, advertising or propaganda. Thanks to the association with the fantastic and unreal children’s world or whit the untruthful fabrication of advertising and

John Grierson defines documentary as the creative treatment of actuality, with this definition he is able to balance a creative vision that is the fundamentals of every form of art, with the respect for the historical reality. In fact, his definition can be analysed as the collaboration of two terms, creative treatment and actuality, the first one reminds us of fiction and the second one refers to the responsibility of journalism and history to refer the

It is possible that the personal point of view of the filmmaker defines the way the historical world is presented to the audience, but still, it has to be a representation of it and not suggested trough a fictional allegory.
Nichols examines more in depth the question of categorizing documentary in his book Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1992). Considering the methods filmmakers operate with reality to covey the truth, Nichols identifies six sub-genres of documentary: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive and performative. These six modes settle conventions and guides that a given film may decide to adopt to as a loose