Even 10 years ago, mixing animation and documentary would have been both impractical and taboo -- animation emerges from the brain of an artist, while documentary is supposed to be grounded in objective truth.

But the plummeting costs of animation and dissolving rules of nonfiction have brought this cinematic odd couple together. Michael Moore's Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine featured an animated sequence created by Howard Moss. Recent PBS documentaries Hybrid and Repetition Compulsion were largely or entirely animated.

Animation, according to Cara Mertes, executive director of the PBS nonfiction series P.O.V., is one sign of a brave new era of documentary. "Documentary has never been more exciting, and that's because of the expansion of the form," said Mertes. "Filmmakers are incorporating fictional elements, experimental elements and animation, and the animation that documentary filmmakers are using has been wonderfully imaginative and extremely effective."

Filmmakers are bringing a number of different styles and methods of animation to their documentaries. In the Realms of the Unreal used After Effects to create a staccato, childlike motion -- like Colorforms come to life -- perfectly appropriate to the subject matter. David Lebrun, in his documentary Proteus, used quick cutting of photographic images to create an animation-like effect.

Proteus explores the life of the 19th- and 20th-century scientist Ernst Haeckel, who discovered, among other things, the radiolarian -- a single-celled organism that comes in a startling diversity of geometric forms. Haeckel sketched more than 4,000 of these, and Lebrun, through a complicated and painstaking photographic process, transferred 1,000 to film.

Lebrun then combined these still images in a process similar to traditional cel animation. Because of that, Proteus is as much a visual experience as a narrative one.

"The animation throws Proteus into something that is beyond documentary into a sensory experience -- hopefully an ecstatic, visionary one," Lebrun said. "If I just presented the animation by itself, outside of the context of the documentary, it would probably seem experimental or radical. But by creating a documentary, I can hopefully propel the audience into a very intense, stroboscopic, hallucinatory animated experience."

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