Never Mind the Bollackers: Here’s the Repositories, Sites and Archives in Nonfiction Animation

Abstract

Paul Wells offers a critical-autobiographical account, augmented by a consistently surprising and thought-provoking range of cross-disciplinary case study examples, of his active and path-breaking engagement in animated documentary theory and production since the early 1990s. Wells engages with the critical literature surrounding the concept and practice of animated documentary but focuses more on the ways in which animation can act as an enabling conduit for a range of visual and/or narrative arts, offering a creative toolbox that supports practitioners engaged in documentary work across a range of disciplines. This chapter advances three central insights: the increasingly multi-disciplinary nature of contemporary visual, literary and popular cultures; the notable aesthetic and ideological potentialities possessed by polyvocal, multi-disciplinary and multi-register creative practices and strategies; and animated documentary’s privileged position at the forefront of present-day re-theorisations of a range of foundational documentary concepts, such as the repository, the record and the archive.