CfP: animated documentary

Please see below for a cfp for a panel I (Bella Honess Roe) am chairing on animated documentary at this year's Visible Evidence conference (9th - 12th August in Istanbul - http://visibleevidence.org/)
Please submit a 300-word proposal with author bio to a.honessroe AT surrey.ac.uk by 12th March

Documentary-animation hybrids have existed since the early days of cinema.  The last
twenty to thirty years, however, have seen a boom in the production of this type of
non-fiction and the breadth of examples continues to widen as animation is used in a
variety of contexts ­ from recovering a traumatic past in Waltz with Bashir, to
reconstructing history in Battle 360, and expressing subjective states of mind in
Animated Minds.  Recently, the form has been gaining increasing attention from critics
and scholars, as demonstrated by the rising number of papers on animated documentary at
documentary and animation conferences worldwide, and it feels as if this topic is on the
cusp of becoming a key area of documentary studies.

This panel proposes to contribute to the growing scholarly dialogue around animated
documentaries by going beyond merely remarking at their existence or marvelling at how
opposites attract.  This panel will interrogate fundamental questions raised by the
convergence of animation and documentary and address how this challenges some of the
foundational assumptions regarding documentary.  In particular, issues regarding
epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and audience affect are thrown into new relief through
the animation of documentary.

Potential paper topics could include:
-       The history of the convergence of animated documentary
-       Animating subjective states of minds and personal experience
-       Documenting unseen and unwitnessable events
-       CGI animation and natural history and science documentaries
-       Indexicality and iconicity
-       The significance of sound in animated documentary
-       The ethics of animated documentary
-       Processes of production
-       The relationship between animation technique/ style and content

Dr. Bella Honess Roe
Lecturer - Film Studies
Department of Dance, Film and Theatre
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey GU2 7XH
+44 (0)1483 683049