The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution is
the first book to provide an historical insight into the animated
documentary.
Drawing on archival research and textual analysis, it shows how this
form, usually believed to be strictly contemporaneous, instead took
shape in the 1940s. Cristina Formenti integrates a theoretical and a
historical approach in order to shed new light on the animated
documentary as a form as well as on the work of renowned studios such as
The Walt Disney Studios, Halas & Batchelor, National Film Board of
Canada and never before addressed ones, such as Corona Cinematografica.
She also highlights the differences and the similarities existing among
the animated documentaries created between the 1940s and the mid-1980s
and those produced today so as to demonstrate how the latter do not
represent a complete otherness in respect to the former, but rather an
evolution.