Outer worlds: animated documentary and critical realism

Premised on matters of construction and fabrication, much of the debate around animated documentary has focused on its capacity to engage with the ‘fantastical’, ‘illusory’ and ‘internal’. Supported by the philosophical position of critical realism, this article will examine the capacity of animation to address the non-empirical levels of the external world. Critical realism argues for the independence of a complex, layered reality, whilst recognising the contingency and fallibility of knowledge. This resists the dualism of the objectivist belief in an observable and measurable reality, against approaches that foreground the subjectivism of language and discourse. In this context, animation is seen to balance the empirical and the conceptual, offering a model of reality that is located in the relationship between the indexical and the abstract. In a challenge to unitary notions of what it means to be objective or subjective, this points to the recognition of the non-dual philosophical principles underpinning animated documentary. In relation to the strategy of defamiliarization, the author argues that constructed aesthetics can function as a mode of inference towards the real but empirically undetectable structures generating actual events. The author also suggests that this can provide access to an ontological depth that is arrived at through an active, imaginative and intersubjective apprehension of the world.