In her recent book Animated Documentary (2013), Annabelle Honess Roe points out that the two cinematic modes that her title references inevitably necessitates an examination of the ontological differences between live action on the one hand and animation on the other. Summarising a range of theory (DelGaudio 1997; Wells 2008; Ward 2011; Glynne 2013), Honess Roe explains that these ontological differences have often been presented as an opposition between the indexical, supposedly objective photographic document of the external world on the one hand, and a subjective, hand-rendered animated form that represents the intervention of the animator and their expressive artistic licence on the other. To an extent, this opposition goes back to Walter Benjamin's articulation of the ‘human-hand’. In the age of mechanical reproduction and changing notions of what constituted an indexical ‘document’, the latter, Benjamin argued, marked a form of ‘subjectivity’ that was to be minimised in indexical image reproduction wherever possible (Benjamin 1999). But in a cinematic context, such discussions were never likely to be conclusive because questions of editing, camera positioning, lighting, film stock and much more meant that the human hand was rarely, if ever, absent from the construction of documentary.

In recent years theorists such as Paul Wells (2008: 295) have highlighted Lev Manovich's observation (2001:195) that in a post-celluloid new media environment, the history of the directly manipulated visual image has, after a brief century-long indexical interlude, come full circle. Manovich argues that the emergence of photographic processes meant that our image culture moved briefly away from representational forms that involved the human hand's direct intervention in their creation, gravitating instead towards a system in which the photographic machine recorded a direct index of what was in front of it. The rise of digital manipulation, however, meant that the pre-indexical1 conditions of visual representation returned with a twist. Digital manipulation, Manovich explains, presents us a landscape in which seemingly live-action, indexical images are routinely reconfigured under a painterly logic, no matter how photo-real they may appear. This throws into question the supposedly indexical image's claim to veracity. In reality, of course, such claims were always questionable: theoretical considerations of documentary and its ontological status were as contested before digital imaging's emergence as they are now.