INTRODUCTION

In today's world, animated imagery is constantly used to convey information in a variety of contexts, from weather reports to flight training simulators and classroom biology videos. As Annabelle Honess Roe (2011: 220) has observed, animation's elucidatory role has been so widely embraced that it is now largely taken for granted. Indeed, the pervasiveness of the drawn image in contemporary nonfictional contexts and academic programmes has caused viewers – and many scholars – to become desensitised to this particular function of animation. As a result, many fascinating questions about the relationship between cinema and teaching and the limits and challenges of visual representation of scientific phenomena remain insufficiently explored. Following excellent recent efforts (Orgeron et al. 2012; Ostherr 2013), this chapter aims to defamiliarise the role and functions of the drawn image in scientific and educational media by going back to the silent period and studying a selection of educational shorts in order to identify and examine the roots of certain foundational trends, methods and approaches that have shaped contemporary nonfiction animation.

Oliver Gaycken (2012) notes that, at the dawn of cinema, before its status as entertainment had been solidified, filmmakers, businessmen and the press thought of it as an educational medium. In the early 1910s, Thomas Edison was occasionally known to proclaim that films would soon replace textbooks (ibid.: 68). At the turn of the teens, American reformers ‘envisioned the cinema as a place where the medium's “impressionable” audiences – usually understood as children, immigrants, and women – could learn about useful things like science, history, and civics‘(ibid.: 83). By the 1920s, animation in particular was already accepted as the ‘default medium for communicating with the “average person”’, according to contemporary pedagogical theories (Ostherr 2012a: 126). This was by no means a strictly American phenomenon: on both sides of the Atlantic, the silent period saw the production of a number of pioneering educational shorts that took advantage of the representational possibilities offered by the drawn image (DelGaudio 1997).

In Russia, for example, the beginnings of animation are tied to nonfiction filmmaking. Soviet film writer Lazar Sukharebsky devoted a section of his book on educational cinema to praising the advantages of animation as an illustrative medium, especially in the context of teaching children (Mihailova and MacKay 2014: 154).