Drawn from Life, a multidisciplinary anthology, introduces readers to a diverse range of filmmakers past and present who use the animated image as a documentary tool. In doing so, it explores 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'? From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, Drawn from Life casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us.