Showing How They Made Them Move: Early Making-of Documentaries on the Production of Animated Films

Abstract

Contrary to popular belief, ‘making-of’ documentaries are not a phenomenon of contemporary home cinema culture, but have a long pre-DVD history. This article engages with a special subcategory: ‘making-of’ documentaries on the production of animation. With a focus on French and American examples, the author retraces the transition of production imagery from metaleptic cartoons to emergent documentary genres of the 1930s, arguing that this historical shift reformulated the question of how the creation of animated films can be captured cinematically. Providing decidedly nonfiction (but not necessarily ‘objective’) images of the making of animation, the films challenged established concepts to address the realm of cinematic production. The article seeks to examine this theoretical potential, using the notion of a cinematic hors-cadre as a key example.