The field of animated documentary production and reception is difficult to delineate, because it is heterogeneous and fuzzy-edged. The typical example is defined as a combination of some kind of animation technique (drawing, puppet-based, CGI and so on) with some prototypical codes and conventions of the documentary (including the traditional claim of veracity). As Annabelle Honess Roe (2013: 1) puts it, animated documentary is thus often seen as something like the cinematic equivalent of an odd couple, ‘a marriage of opposites, made complicated by different ways of seeing the world’. The use of traditional formal characteristics of documentary cinema, however, does not necessarily imply that a given film's proffered content is real. For instance, The Order Electrus (Floris Kaayk, 2005) may present many obvious features (such as a voice-over explaining animal behaviour) of a classical David Attenborough nature documentary, but the work's so-called ‘filmed reality’ is partly fabricated. While the locations are real, the film's insects are in fact animated objects made of parts used in the manufacture of electronic equipment. It is precisely the explicit insistence on documentary status (through photorealistic sequences and presentational mimicry of the classic television nature documentary) combined with a highly constructed ‘reality’ that makes The Order Electrus such a fascinating and humorous experience.

In fact, many non-animated documentaries are also to some degree fabricated as well. So-called television ‘wildlife’ documentaries, for example, typically imply that real animals have been filmed in their natural habitat, but in fact, nature scenes are sometimes set up in a studio in order to achieve better filming quality (Mendick and Malnick 2011). Turning to the origins of cinema documentary, in the pioneering Nanook of the North (1922) director Robert J. Flaherty staged various events because he did not want to present his Inuit human subjects as they were at the time of the filming, but rather as he reasoned they might have been in a previous era (Burton and Thompson 2002: 79). Surveying many other such cases, Derek Paget (1998: 107) concludes that very often in documentary history, ideas of theory and practice, and of ‘fiction’ and ‘fact’, are neither easily nor consistently separable.