The work of animator and filmmaker Lewis Klahr is barely recognisable as documentary. His works are fragmented, surreal, stop-frame investigations hard to categorise alongside contemporary films routinely referred to as examples of animated documentary, work such as Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) or Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007) (see, for example, Honess Roe 2013: 139–69). Klahr makes no direct attempt to engage with common-sense, conventional definitions of ‘reality’ through naturalistic forms of cinematic representation or storytelling. To see Klahr's films as documentary, one has to look beyond a straightforward definition of that concept. Making such an interpretative leap, however, allows for an examination of how animation itself can be understood as a visual medium that is entangled in history and politics, and that thus contains individual works that can be plausibly understood as ‘documents’ in certain ways.

This essay uses consideration of Klahr's work as a vehicle through which a range of questions closely related to the idea of ‘animated documentary’ can be explored. Is there an opposition between the documentary and the document? What are some of the ways in which the ‘documentary turn’ in filmmaking and art practice during the last two decades might be symptomatic of contemporaneous concerns with the relationship between the factual, the social and the cultural? Is a distinction between concepts of the documentary and the document helpful when we come to consider a specific emergent filmmaking tradition such as documentary animation? And, does that attempted distinc-tion relate to the traditional binary opposition between form and content visible within countless critical discussions and creative works drawn from a variety of aesthetic traditions, documentary film and animation included?

Recent critical suggestions that there is indeed such a genre of film as animated documentary perhaps have their roots in a conviction that it is possible to identify a more or less coherent form of film object which can be associated with that generic label (see, for example, Glynne 2013; Honess Roe 2013). An animated documentary might (or might not) address certain forms of subject matter; it might (or might not) be a film work that is constructed according to certain consensually recognised and respected narrative conventions; it might (or might not) conform to certain similarly agreed rules about how to represent particular real-life events or issues.