Imaginative Animated Non-Fiction: Educating Adults about Child Soldiers

Abstract

This case study investigates the overlapping categories of animated documentary, useful animation, and fiction inspired by real events. It analyzes a training video for adults who work with child soldiers that was created by IoM Media and the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace, and Security. This video incorporates elements of animated narrative fiction, children’s television animation, reenactment, and photographic and auditory indexicality. Ultimately, no one form has a greater claim to the truth than the others; rather, truth is constructed through the interrelation of disparate elements, and the video’s pedagogical and activist ends are served by abstraction and anti-realism as much as by indexicality. The video also prompts wider questions about temporality and degrees of abstraction in different modes of documentary. The arguments this article presents about the case study are more broadly applicable to non-fiction animated film and to both live-action and animated documentary.