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.