Before Sound, there was Soul: The Role of Animation in Silent Nonfiction Cinema

Abstract

Mihaela Mihailova examines the role and functions of the drawn image within early-twentieth-century scientific and educational media texts (in this case, a range of 1920s educational animated short films). Exploring seminal names from animation history, such as Bray Productions and the Fleischer brothers, Mihailova demonstrates the contemporary resonances and applications of these works. The chapter examines a range of foundational trends, methods and approaches that subsequently shaped animated documentary during the nine decades since the advent of sound. Examining the functions which the drawn image fulfils, animation is seen as a metacommentary on its own expressive limitations, as well as those of nonfiction, foregrounding the challenges of conveying reality by means of a single representational mode. At once liberated from the concreteness of the photographic record and limited in their abstraction by the requirements of scientific content, these films occupy a position between mechanical recording and pure artistic creation.

The Ever-Expanding Scope of Animation Historiography: A Discussion of Interdisciplinary Approaches and Methods

“…Another large corpus of marginalized films that often are at least partly animated has become a recent object of study, being researched under overlapping terms such as ‘utility film’ (Bonah et al, 2018; Hediger and Vonderau, 2009a; Masson, 2012), ‘non-theatrical film’ (Slide, 1992; Streible et al, 2007), ‘ephemeral film’ (a term used by Rick Prelinger to refer to his archive from the mid-1980s onwards, see Wisniewski, 2008: 3) and ‘useful cinema’ (Acland and Wasson, 2011), which speaks of the vitality in writing the history of this material and how the formation of terminology is a process. Again, animation is fleetingly addressed in several of these studies as one of the many elements of the films, but it is very rarely the main focus of the research (some of the most notable exceptions are Curtis, 2018; Gaycken, 2014; Laukötter, 2013; Mihailova, 2019; Ostherr, 2018; Papenburg, 2018a, 2018b; Reichert, 2009). One of the most extensively researched genres of ephemeral films that relies on animation is advertising (Colpan and Nsiah, 2016; Cook, 2019; Cook and Thompson, 2019; Cowan, 2013; Forster, 2013).…”