Animating History. A research exploration on the informative voices of animation

Within a wide dissemination project, we have recently been involved in making the contents of a manuscript from 1316 – the medieval “Statuti” of the city of Sassari – more accessible to the general public. The project has offered us an extraordinary opportunity to explore the powers of animation as a way to inform while entertaining and exciting an audience. The development of various audiovisual artifacts material for the project has allowed us to achieve two important goals. In first place to pay homage to some of the foremost examples of informative animation of the Twentieth Century. Secondarily they have helped us in retracing some ever-green formulas that, by combining social, scientific, technical and historical facts with storytelling, make of the language of animation a very powerful informative mean.