It now seems uncontroversial to talk about the hybrid category ‘animated documentary’ – though there is still considerable debate over what might belong in such a category, and about the accuracy of the term. Honess Roe (2013) offers the most comprehensive overview of this complex and contentious field. As one would expect with a still-emerging area of scholarship, there are discussions about animated documentary's limits: should we include animated games, nanotechnological visualisations and/or explorations of fantasy or memory? New work is emerging all the time (see, for example, Ehrlich 2015; Moore 2015), and Rosenkrantz (2011) provides an interesting recent discussion of some of the theoretical differences of opinion within the field. Despite the growing critical literature, more work is needed in delineating how people understand or relate to – in a word, how they experience – what might be commonly defined as animated documentary. This chapter's approach is to examine some animated documentaries and focus on how they position the viewer in relation to the events they depict. More specifically, I am interested in how animation (or animated scenes in an otherwise live-action documentary) may or may not be perceived as a form of ‘re-enactment’, and also in the complex web of temporal relations brought into play by thinking of animated documentary scenes in this way. As we shall see, the term ‘re-enactment’ is more complex than it first appears – it cannot simply be reduced to the simplistic sense of an ‘action replay’ of events, but raises all sorts of questions about performance, agency, point of view and, in particular, temporality.

Central to my discussion, therefore, are the ways in which some animated documentaries, in their re-presentation of past events, foreground and heighten the temporal relations at play. This will entail opening out how we think about animated representations of real historical events to include their ‘fantasmatic’ and ‘atavistic’ dimensions. The point of discussing these two concepts is to emphasise the fact that we are not talking about a simple ‘re-presentation’ of something that happened, but rather, a complex inter-relating of past events and present viewing experience.