Cultural heritage convergence: the intersection of animated docudrama and communication design

Animated documentaries for cultural heritage are not new forms of production and, thanks to the informative power and the imperative historical accuracy, they have been used by public entities, research and cultural institutions to promote knowledge of historical events, works of art, social contexts, and characters of historical or scientific importance. This paper questions the power of narratives belonging to a specific subcategory of documentary, namely docudrama, to convey information, communicate and enhance cultural heritage. Animated docudramas compromise between the fly-on-the-wall documentaries’ typical approach and a scripted narrative based on real characters and events, and – according to Andy Glynne (2013) – more than any other form of documentary, are capable of evoking memories, representing subjectivity, and building a bridge between the external world made by people and objects, and the internal world made up of thoughts and emotions. What does change if we decide to narrate Cultural Heritage in an animated form that exploits the design paradigms of documentary and fictional storytelling? By exploring a bunch of selected case studies, the paper defines hypothetical strategies to recognize and produce an animated docudrama for Cultural Heritage that hybridize production coordinates and communication design parameters, and formulates an evaluation matrix that compares animated docudramas in terms of languages, narrative structures and codes of representation.