's 1918 film
The Sinking of the Lusitania was the first animated documentary. The first recognized example of this genre is Winsor McCay's 1918 12-minute-long film
The Sinking of the Lusitania, which uses animation to portray the 1915 sinking of after it was struck by two torpedoes launched by a German
U-boat; an event of which no recorded film footage is known to exist. Since the 1920s, animation has been used in
educational and
social guidance films, and has often been used to illustrate abstract concepts in mainly live-action examples of these genres. Early examples of fully animated educational films are
The Einstein Theory of Relativity and
Evolution (both 1923) by
Max and Dave Fleischer.
Of Stars and Men, a 1964 animated feature by
John Hubley which tells of humankind's quest to find its place in the universe, won an award in the documentary category at the
San Francisco Film Festival. The 2007
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam featured a programme of "documentaries that partly or completely consist of animation". In the article written to accompany the event, Kees Driessen talked about the "least controversial" form of the genre; the "illustrated
radio documentary", citing
Aardman Animation's 1987 film
Lip Synch: Going Equipped (directed by
Peter Lord) as an example. One of the most consistent creators of this form of animated documentary today is
Paul Fierlinger. His films from the late 1980s-onward typically feature recordings of people talking about certain topics in their lives (such as alcohol abuse or loneliness), accompanied by Fierlinger's animation which mainly illustrates the stories in a realistic way. This is a contrast from films and series such as Aardman's
Creature Comforts, which
recontextualise such audio recordings by combining them with more fanciful, non-realistic animated interpretations. Fierlinger's 1995 animated feature-length
autobiography Drawn from Memory, in which he is the main subject as well as the director, voice actor and only animator, was also called a documentary by Driessen. was advertised as being the first feature-length animated documentary. Some animated documentaries that were nominated or won for Oscars are
So Much for So Little (1949),
Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square (1998),
The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation (2005),
I Met the Walrus (2007),
Last Day of Freedom (2015) and
Flee (2021). ==References==