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Documentary cinema has always drawn from real life, but an increasing number of contemporary filmmakers are going further still, drawing onscreen images of reality through a range of animated filmmaking techniques. Drawn from Life is the first book to explore the field of animated documentaries from a diverse range of scholarly and practice-based perspectives, exploring and proposing answers to a range of questions that preoccupy twenty-first-century film artists and audiences alike: Why use animation to document? How do such images reflect and influence our understanding and experience of reality, whether public or private, psychological or political? From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, this book casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us, challenging the orthodox definitions of documentary cinema.