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Documentary film

A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".

Early documentary films, originally called "actuality films", briefly lasted for one minute or less. Over time, documentaries have evolved to become longer in length and to include more categories. Some examples are educational, observational and docufiction. Documentaries are very informative, and are often used within schools as a resource to teach various principles. Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to be truthful to their vision of the world without intentionally misrepresenting a topic.

Social media platforms (such as YouTube) have provided an avenue for the growth of the documentary-film genre. These platforms have increased the distribution area and ease-of-accessibility.

Definition
Polish writer and filmmaker Bolesław Matuszewski was among those who identified the mode of documentary film. He wrote two of the earliest texts on cinema, Une nouvelle source de l'histoire ("A New Source of History") and La photographie animée ("Animated photography"). Both were published in 1898 in French and were among the earliest written works to consider the historical and documentary value of the film. Matuszewski is also among the first filmmakers to propose the creation of a Film Archive to collect and keep safe visual materials.

The word "documentary" was coined by Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by "The Moviegoer" (a pen name for Grierson).

Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts for interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance; however, this position is at variance with Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov's credos of provocation to present "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously), and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera).

The American film critic Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which is dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a specific message, along with the facts it presents. Scholar Betsy McLane asserted that documentaries are for filmmakers to convey their views about historical events, people, and places which they find significant. Therefore, the advantage of documentaries lies in introducing new perspectives which may not be prevalent in traditional media such as written publications and school curricula.

Documentary practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries.

Documentary filmmaking can be used as a form of journalism, advocacy, or personal expression.

Pre-1900
Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. Single-shot moments were captured on film, such as a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work. These short films were called "actuality" films; the term "documentary" was not coined until 1926. Many of the first films, such as those made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, were a minute or less in length, due to technological limitations. Examples can be viewed on YouTube.

Films showing many people (for example, leaving a factory) were often made for commercial reasons: the people being filmed were eager to see, for payment, the film showing them. One notable film clocked in at over an hour and a half, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight. Using pioneering film-looping technology, Enoch J. Rector presented the entirety of a famous 1897 prize-fight on cinema screens across the United States.

In May 1896, Bolesław Matuszewski recorded on film a few surgical operations in Warsaw and Saint Petersburg hospitals. In 1898, French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen invited Matuszewski and Clément Maurice to record his surgical operations. They started in Paris a series of surgical films sometime before July 1898. Until 1906, the year of his last film, Doyen recorded more than 60 operations. Doyen said that his first films taught him how to correct professional errors he had been unaware of. For scientific purposes, after 1906, Doyen combined 15 of his films into three compilations, two of which survive, the six-film series Extirpation des tumeurs encapsulées (1906), and the four-film Les Opérations sur la cavité crânienne (1911). These and five other of Doyen's films survive.

Between July 1898 and 1901, the Romanian professor Gheorghe Marinescu made several science films in his neurology clinic in Bucharest: Walking Troubles of Organic Hemiplegy (1898), The Walking Troubles of Organic Paraplegies (1899), A Case of Hysteric Hemiplegy Healed Through Hypnosis (1899), The Walking Troubles of Progressive Locomotion Ataxy (1900), and Illnesses of the Muscles (1901). All these short films have been preserved. The professor called his works "studies with the help of the cinematograph," and published the results, along with several consecutive frames, in issues of La Semaine Médicale magazine from Paris, between 1899 and 1902. In 1924, Auguste Lumière recognized the merits of Marinescu's science films: "I've seen your scientific reports about the usage of the cinematograph in studies of nervous illnesses, when I was still receiving La Semaine Médicale, but back then I had other concerns, which left me no spare time to begin biological studies. I must say I forgot those works and I am thankful to you that you reminded them to me. Unfortunately, not many scientists have followed your way."

1900–1920
Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. They were often referred to by distributors as "scenics". Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time. An important early film which moved beyond the concept of the scenic was In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), which embraced primitivism and exoticism in a staged story presented as truthful re-enactments of the life of Native Americans.

Contemplation is a separate area. Pathé was the best-known global manufacturer of such films in the early 20th century. A vivid example is Moscow Clad in Snow (1909).

Biographical documentaries appeared during this time, such as the feature Eminescu-Veronica-Creangă (1914) on the relationship between the writers Mihai Eminescu, Veronica Micle and Ion Creangă (all deceased at the time of the production), released by the Bucharest chapter of Pathé.

Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor (known for the feature With Our King and Queen Through India (1912)) and Prizma Color (known for Everywhere With Prizma (1919) and the five-reel feature Bali the Unknown (1921)) used travelogues to promote the new color processes. In contrast, Technicolor concentrated primarily on getting their process adopted by Hollywood studios for fiction feature films.

Also during this period, Frank Hurley's feature documentary film, South (1919) about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was released. The film documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1914.

Romanticism
With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism. Flaherty filmed a number of heavily staged romantic documentary films during this time period, often showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then. For instance, in Nanook of the North, Flaherty did not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpoon instead. Some of Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the time.

Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty's Nanook and Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), both directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack.

City symphony
The "city symphony" sub film genre consisted of avant-garde films during the 1920s and 1930s. These films were particularly influenced by modern art, namely Cubism, Constructivism, and Impressionism. According to art historian and author Scott MacDonald, city symphony films can be described as, "An intersection between documentary and avant-garde film: an avant-doc"; however, A.L. Rees suggests regarding them as avant-garde films.

Early titles produced within this genre include: Manhatta (New York; dir. Paul Strand, 1921); Rien que les heures/Nothing But The Hours (France; dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926); Twenty Four Dollar Island (dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1927); Moscow (dir. Mikhail Kaufman, 1927); Études sur Paris (dir. André Sauvage, 1928); The Bridge (1928) and Rain (1929), both by Joris Ivens; São Paulo, Sinfonia da Metrópole (dir. Adalberto Kemeny, 1929), Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (dir. Walter Ruttmann, 1927); Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929); Douro, Faina Fluvial (dir. Manoel de Oliveira, 1931); and Rhapsody in Two Languages (dir. Gordon Sparling, 1934).

A city symphony film, as the name suggests, is most often based around a major metropolitan city area and seeks to capture the life, events and activities of the city. It can use abstract cinematography (Walter Ruttman's Berlin) or may use Soviet montage theory (Dziga Vertov's, Man with a Movie Camera). Most importantly, a city symphony film is a form of cinepoetry, shot and edited in the style of a "symphony".

The European continental tradition (See: Realism) focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the so-called city symphony films such as Walter Ruttmann's, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (of which Grierson noted in an article that Berlin, represented what a documentary should not be); Alberto Cavalcanti's, Rien que les heures; and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean towards the avant-garde.

Kino-Pravda
Dziga Vertov was central to the Soviet Kino-Pravda (literally, "cinematic truth") newsreel series of the 1920s. Vertov believed the camera – with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion – could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and created a film philosophy from it.

Newsreel tradition
The newsreel tradition is important in documentary film. Newsreels at this time were sometimes staged but were usually re-enactments of events that had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they were in the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footage from the early 20th century was staged; the cameramen would usually arrive on site after a major battle and re-enact scenes to film them.

1930s–1940s
The propagandist tradition consists of films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the most celebrated and controversial propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will (1935), which chronicled the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and was commissioned by Adolf Hitler. Leftist filmmakers Joris Ivens and Henri Storck directed Borinage (1931) about the Belgian coal mining region. Luis Buñuel directed a "surrealist" documentary Las Hurdes (1933).

Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) and Willard Van Dyke's The City (1939) are notable New Deal productions, each presenting complex combinations of social and ecological awareness, government propaganda, and leftist viewpoints. Frank Capra's Why We Fight (1942–1944) series was a newsreel series in the United States, commissioned by the government to convince the U.S. public that it was time to go to war. Constance Bennett and her husband Henri de la Falaise produced two feature-length documentaries, Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935) filmed in Bali, and Kilou the Killer Tiger (1936) filmed in Indochina.

In Canada, the Film Board, set up by John Grierson, was set up for the same propaganda reasons. It also created newsreels that were seen by their national governments as legitimate counter-propaganda to the psychological warfare of Nazi Germany orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels.

In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together under John Grierson. They became known as the Documentary Film Movement. Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, and Humphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blending propaganda, information, and education with a more poetic aesthetic approach to documentary. Examples of their work include Drifters (John Grierson), Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright), Fires Were Started, and A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings). Their work involved poets such as W. H. Auden, composers such as Benjamin Britten, and writers such as J. B. Priestley. Among the best known films of the movement are Night Mail and Coal Face.

Calling Mr. Smith (1943) is an anti-Nazi color film  created by Stefan Themerson which is both a documentary and an avant-garde film against war. It was one of the first anti-Nazi films in history.

Cinéma-vérité
Cinéma vérité (or the closely related direct cinema) was dependent on some technical advances to exist: light, quiet and reliable cameras, and portable sync sound.

Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints. Shooting on location, with smaller crews, would also happen in the French New Wave, the filmmakers taking advantage of advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded.

Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences between cinéma vérité (Jean Rouch) and the North American "direct cinema" (or more accurately "cinéma direct"), pioneered by, among others, Canadians Allan King, Michel Brault, and Pierre Perrault, and Americans Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman and Albert and David Maysles.

The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of involvement with their subjects. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault, Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or even provocation when they deem it necessary.

The films Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch), Dont Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker), Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles), Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman), Primary and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (both produced by Robert Drew), Harlan County, USA (directed by Barbara Kopple), Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor) are all frequently deemed cinéma vérité films.

The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80 to one. From there, editors find and sculpt the work into a film. The editors of the movement – such as Werner Nold, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde – are often overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they were often given co-director credits.

Famous cinéma vérité/direct cinema films include Les Raquetteurs, Showman, Salesman, Near Death, and The Children Were Watching.

Political weapons
In the 1960s and 1970s, documentary film was often regarded as a political weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general, especially in Latin America, but also in a changing society. La Hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, from 1968), directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, influenced a whole generation of filmmakers. Among the many political documentaries produced in the early 1970s was "Chile: A Special Report", public television's first in-depth expository look at the September 1973 overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in Chile by military leaders under Augusto Pinochet, produced by documentarians Ari Martinez and José Garcia.

A June 2020 article in The New York Times reviewed the political documentary And She Could Be Next, directed by Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia. The Times described the documentary not only as focusing on women in politics, but more specifically on women of color, their communities, and the significant changes they have wrought upon America.

Modern documentaries
Box office analysts have noted that the documentary film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Food, Inc., Earth, March of the Penguins, and An Inconvenient Truth among the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable.

The nature of documentary films has expanded in the past 30 years from the cinéma vérité style introduced in the 1960s in which the use of portable camera and sound equipment allowed an intimate relationship between filmmaker and subject. The line blurs between documentary and narrative and some works are very personal, such as Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) and Black Is...Black Ain't (1995), which mix expressive, poetic, and rhetorical elements and stresses subjectivities rather than historical materials.

Historical documentaries, such as the landmark 14-hour Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1986 – Part 1 and 1989 – Part 2) by Henry Hampton, 4 Little Girls (1997) by Spike Lee, The Civil War by Ken Burns, and UNESCO-awarded independent film on slavery 500 Years Later, express not only a distinctive voice but also a perspective and point of views. Some films such as The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris incorporate stylized re-enactments, and Michael Moore's Roger & Me place far more interpretive control with the director. The commercial success of these documentaries may derive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda." However, directorial manipulation of documentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and may be endemic to the form due to problematic ontological foundations.

Documentary filmmakers are increasingly using social impact campaigns with their films. Social impact campaigns seek to leverage media projects by converting public awareness of social issues and causes into engagement and action, largely by offering the audience a way to get involved. Examples of such documentaries include Kony 2012, Salam Neighbor, Gasland, Living on One Dollar, and Girl Rising.

Although documentaries are financially more viable with the increasing popularity of the genre and the advent of the DVD, funding for documentary film production remains elusive. Within the past decade, the largest exhibition opportunities have emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakers beholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who have become their largest funding source.

Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The "making-of" documentary shows how a movie or a computer game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary.

Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this change was Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, where 150 DV cameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to record themselves.

Documentaries without words
Films in the documentary form without words have been made. Listen to Britain, directed by Humphrey Jennings and Stuart McAllister in 1942, is a wordless meditation on wartime Britain. From 1982, the Qatsi trilogy and the similar Baraka could be described as visual tone poems, with music related to the images, but no spoken content. Koyaanisqatsi (part of the Qatsi trilogy) consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. Baraka tries to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity and religious ceremonies.

Bodysong was made in 2003 and won a British Independent Film Award for "Best British Documentary."

The 2004 film Genesis shows animal and plant life in states of expansion, decay, sex, and death, with some, but little, narration.

Narration styles
The traditional style for narration is to have a dedicated narrator read a script which is dubbed onto the audio track. The narrator never appears on camera and may not necessarily have knowledge of the subject matter or involvement in the writing of the script. This style of narration uses title screens to visually narrate the documentary. The screens are held for about 5–10 seconds to allow adequate time for the viewer to read them. They are similar to the ones shown at the end of movies based on true stories, but they are shown throughout, typically between scenes. In this style, there is a host who appears on camera, conducts interviews, and who also does voice-overs.
 * Voice-over narrator
 * Silent narration
 * Hosted narrator

Hybrid documentary
The release of The Thin Blue Line (1988) directed by Errol Morris introduced possibilities for emerging forms of the hybrid documentary. Indeed, it was disqualified for an Academy Award because of the stylized recreations. Traditional documentary filmmaking typically removes signs of fictionalization to distinguish itself from fictional film genres. Audiences have recently become more distrustful of the media's traditional fact production, making them more receptive to experimental ways of telling facts. The hybrid documentary implements truth games to challenge traditional fact production. Although it is fact-based, the hybrid documentary is not explicit about what should be understood, creating an open dialogue between subject and audience. Clio Barnard's The Arbor (2010), Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012), Mads Brügger's The Ambassador, and Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach (2011) are a few notable examples.

Docufiction
Docufiction is a hybrid genre from two basic ones, fiction film and documentary, practiced since the first documentary films were made.

Fake-fiction
Fake-fiction is a genre which deliberately presents real, unscripted events in the form of a fiction film, making them appear as staged. The concept was introduced by Pierre Bismuth to describe his 2016 film Where is Rocky II?

DVD documentary
A DVD documentary is a documentary film of indeterminate length that has been produced with the sole intent of releasing it for direct sale to the public on DVD, which is different from a documentary being made and released first on television or on a cinema screen (a.k.a. theatrical release) and subsequently on DVD for public consumption.

This form of documentary release is becoming more popular and accepted as costs and difficulty with finding TV or theatrical release slots increases. It is also commonly used for more "specialist" documentaries, which might not have general interest to a wider TV audience. Examples are military, cultural arts, transport, sports, animals, etc.

Compilation films
Compilation films were pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. More recent examples include Point of Order! (1964), directed by Emile de Antonio about the McCarthy hearings. Similarly, The Last Cigarette combines the testimony of various tobacco company executives before the U.S. Congress with archival propaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.

Poetic documentaries, which first appeared in the 1920s, were a sort of reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film. The poetic mode moved away from continuity editing and instead organized images of the material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space. Well-rounded characters – "lifelike people" – were absent; instead, people appeared in these films as entities, just like any other, that are found in the material world. The films were fragmentary, impressionistic, lyrical. Their disruption of the coherence of time and space – a coherence favored by the fiction films of the day – can also be seen as an element of the modernist counter-model of cinematic narrative. The "real world" – Nichols calls it the "historical world" – was broken up into fragments and aesthetically reconstituted using film form. Examples of this style include Joris Ivens' Rain (1928), which records a passing summer shower over Amsterdam; László Moholy-Nagy's Play of Light: Black, White, Grey (1930), in which he films one of his own kinetic sculptures, emphasizing not the sculpture itself but the play of light around it; Oskar Fischinger's abstract animated films; Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y. (1957), a city symphony film; and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982).

Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view. These films are rhetorical, and try to persuade the viewer. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds "objective" and omniscient. Images are often not paramount; they exist to advance the argument. The rhetoric insistently presses upon us to read the images in a certain fashion. Historical documentaries in this mode deliver an unproblematic and "objective" account and interpretation of past events.

Examples: TV shows and films like Biography, America's Most Wanted, many science and nature documentaries, Ken Burns' The Civil War (1990), Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New (1980), John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972), Frank Capra's wartime Why We Fight series, and Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936).

Observational
Observational documentaries attempt to spontaneously observe their subjects with minimal intervention. Filmmakers who worked in this subgenre often saw the poetic mode as too abstract and the expository mode as too didactic. The first observational docs date back to the 1960s; the technological developments which made them possible include mobile lightweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment for synchronized sound. Often, this mode of film eschewed voice-over commentary, post-synchronized dialogue and music, or re-enactments. The films aimed for immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations.

Types
Participatory documentaries believe that it is impossible for the act of filmmaking to not influence or alter the events being filmed. What these films do is emulate the approach of the anthropologist: participant-observation. Not only is the filmmaker part of the film, we also get a sense of how situations in the film are affected or altered by their presence. Nichols: "The filmmaker steps out from behind the cloak of voice-over commentary, steps away from poetic meditation, steps down from a fly-on-the-wall perch, and becomes a social actor (almost) like any other. (Almost like any other because the filmmaker retains the camera, and with it, a certain degree of potential power and control over events.)" The encounter between filmmaker and subject becomes a critical element of the film. Rouch and Morin named the approach cinéma vérité, translating Dziga Vertov's kinopravda into French; the "truth" refers to the truth of the encounter rather than some absolute truth.

Reflexive documentaries do not see themselves as a transparent window on the world; instead, they draw attention to their own constructedness, and the fact that they are representations. How does the world get represented by documentary films? This question is central to this subgenre of films. They prompt us to "question the authenticity of documentary in general." It is the most self-conscious of all the modes, and is highly skeptical of "realism". It may use Brechtian alienation strategies to jar us, in order to "defamiliarize" what we are seeing and how we are seeing it.

Performative documentaries stress subjective experience and emotional response to the world. They are strongly personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it might be like for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is not our own, e.g. that of black, gay men in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989) or Jenny Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1991). This subgenre might also lend itself to certain groups (e.g. women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, etc.) to "speak about themselves". Often, a battery of techniques, many borrowed from fiction or avant-garde films, are used. Performative docs often link up personal accounts or experiences with larger political or historical realities.

Educational films
Documentaries are shown in schools around the world in order to educate students. Used to introduce various topics to children, they are often used with a school lesson or shown many times to reinforce an idea.

Translation
There are several challenges associated with translation of documentaries. The main two are working conditions and problems with terminology.

Working conditions
Documentary translators very often have to meet tight deadlines. Normally, the translator has between five and seven days to hand over the translation of a 90-minute programme. Dubbing studios typically give translators a week to translate a documentary, but in order to earn a good salary, translators have to deliver their translations in a much shorter period, usually when the studio decides to deliver the final programme to the client sooner or when the broadcasting channel sets a tight deadline, e.g. on documentaries discussing the latest news.

Another problem is the lack of postproduction script or the poor quality of the transcription. A correct transcription is essential for a translator to do their work properly, however many times the script is not even given to the translator, which is a major impediment since documentaries are characterised by "the abundance of terminological units and very specific proper names". When the script is given to the translator, it is usually poorly transcribed or outright incorrect making the translation unnecessarily difficult and demanding because all of the proper names and specific terminology have to be correct in a documentary programme in order for it to be a reliable source of information, hence the translator has to check every term on their own. Such mistakes in proper names are for instance: "Jungle Reinhard instead of Django Reinhart, Jorn Asten instead of Jane Austen, and Magnus Axle instead of Aldous Huxley".

Terminology
The process of translation of a documentary programme requires working with very specific, often scientific terminology. Documentary translators are not usually specialists in a given field. Therefore, they are compelled to undertake extensive research whenever asked to make a translation of a specific documentary programme in order to understand it correctly and deliver the final product free of mistakes and inaccuracies. Generally, documentaries contain a large number of specific terms, with which translators have to familiarise themselves on their own, for example:

The documentary Beetles, Record Breakers makes use of 15 different terms to refer to beetles in less than 30 minutes (longhorn beetle, cellar beetle, stag beetle, burying beetle or gravediggers, sexton beetle, tiger beetle, bloody nose beetle, tortoise beetle, diving beetle, devil's coach horse, weevil, click beetle, malachite beetle, oil beetle, cockchafer), apart from mentioning other animals such as horseshoe bats or meadow brown butterflies.

This poses a real challenge for the translators because they have to render the meaning, i.e. find an equivalent, of a very specific, scientific term in the target language and frequently the narrator uses a more general name instead of a specific term and the translator has to rely on the image presented in the programme to understand which term is being discussed in order to transpose it in the target language accordingly. Additionally, translators of minorised languages often have to face another problem: some terms may not even exist in the target language. In such cases, they have to create new terminology or consult specialists to find proper solutions. Also, sometimes the official nomenclature differs from the terminology used by actual specialists, which leaves the translator to decide between using the official vocabulary that can be found in the dictionary, or rather opting for spontaneous expressions used by real experts in real life situations.

Some documentary film awards

 * Grierson Awards
 * Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature
 * Joris Ivens Award, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), (named after Joris Ivens)
 * Filmmaker Award, Margaret Mead Film Festival
 * Grand Prize, Visions du Réel

Sources and bibliography

 * Aitken, Ian (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. New York: Routledge, 2005. ISBN 978-1-57958-445-0.
 * Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0-19-507898-5. Still a useful introduction.
 * Ron Burnett. "Reflections on the Documentary Cinema"
 * Burton, Julianne (ed.). The Social Documentary in Latin America. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. ISBN 978-0-8229-3621-3.
 * Dawson, Jonathan. "Dziga Vertov".
 * Ellis, Jack C., and Betsy A. McLane. "A New History of Documentary Film." New York: Continuum International, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8264-1750-3, ISBN 978-0-8264-1751-0.
 * Godmilow, Jill: Kill the Documentary. A Letter to Filmmakers, Students and Scholars, Foreword by Bill Nichols, Columbia UP, New York 2022
 * Goldsmith, David A. The Documentary Makers: Interviews with 15 of the Best in the Business. Hove, East Sussex: RotoVision, 2003. ISBN 978-2-88046-730-2.
 * Klotman, Phyllis R. and Culter, Janet K.(eds.). Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-253-21347-1.
 * Leach, Jim, and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds.). Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-8020-4732-8, ISBN 978-0-8020-8299-2.
 * Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-253-33954-6, ISBN 978-0-253-21469-0.
 * Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0-253-34060-3, ISBN 978-0-253-20681-7.
 * Nornes, Markus. Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8166-4907-5, ISBN 978-0-8166-4908-2.
 * Nornes, Markus. Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-8166-4045-4, ISBN 978-0-8166-4046-1.
 * Rotha, Paul, Documentary diary; An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939. New York: Hill and Wang, 1973. ISBN 978-0-8090-3933-3.
 * Saunders, Dave. Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-905674-16-9, ISBN 978-1-905674-15-2.
 * Saunders, Dave. Documentary: The Routledge Film Guidebook. London: Routledge, 2010.
 * Tobias, Michael. The Search for Reality: The Art of Documentary Filmmaking. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions 1997. ISBN 0-941188-62-0
 * Walker, Janet, and Diane Waldeman (eds.). Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-8166-3006-6, ISBN 978-0-8166-3007-3.
 * Wyver, John. The Moving Image: An International History of Film, Television & Radio. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. in association with the British Film Institute, 1989. ISBN 978-0-631-15529-4.
 * Murdoch.edu, Documentary – reading list
 * Murdoch.edu, Documentary – reading list

Ethnographic film

 * Emilie de Brigard, "The History of Ethnographic Film," in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings. Berlin and New York City : Mouton de Gruyter, 1995, pp. 13–43.
 * Leslie Devereaux, "Cultures, Disciplines, Cinemas," in Fields of Vision. Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux & Roger Hillman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 329–339.
 * Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds.), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-520-23231-0.
 * Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-521-77310-2.
 * Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
 * Luc de Heusch, Cinéma et Sciences Sociales, Paris: UNESCO, 1962. Published in English as The Cinema and Social Science. A Survey of Ethnographic and Sociological Films. UNESCO, 1962.
 * Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible. New York & London: Routledge, 1990.
 * Pierre-L. Jordan, Premier Contact-Premier Regard, Marseille: Musées de Marseille. Images en Manoeuvres Editions, 1992.
 * André Leroi-Gourhan, "Cinéma et Sciences Humaines. Le Film Ethnologique Existe-t-il?," Revue de Géographie Humaine et d'Ethnologie 3 (1948), pp. 42–50.
 * David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-691-01234-6.
 * David MacDougall, "Whose Story Is It?," in Ethnographic Film Aesthetics and Narrative Traditions, ed. Peter I. Crawford and Jan K. Simonsen. Aarhus, Intervention Press, 1992, pp. 25–42.
 * Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0-8223-1840-8.
 * Georges Sadoul, Histoire Générale du Cinéma. Vol. 1, L'Invention du Cinéma 1832–1897. Paris: Denöel, 1977, pp. 73–110.
 * Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du Cinéma, Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1977, pp. 7–74.
 * Charles Warren, "Introduction, with a Brief History of Nonfiction Film," in Beyond Document. Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996, pp. 1–22.
 * Ismail Xavier, "Cinema: Revelação e Engano", in O Olhar, ed. Adauto Novaes. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1993, pp. 367–384.

title: Documentary film


text:
Day of the Tentacle

Day of the Tentacle, also known as Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle, is a 1993 graphic adventure game developed and published by LucasArts. It is the sequel to the 1987 game Maniac Mansion. The plot follows Bernard Bernoulli and his friends Hoagie and Laverne as they attempt to stop the evil Purple Tentacle - a sentient, disembodied tentacle - from taking over the world. The player takes control of the trio and solves puzzles while using time travel to explore different periods of history.

Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer co-led the game's development, their first time in such a role. The pair carried over a limited number of elements from Maniac Mansion and forwent the character selection aspect to simplify development. Inspirations included Chuck Jones cartoons and the history of the United States. Day of the Tentacle was the eighth LucasArts game to use the SCUMM engine.

The game was released simultaneously on floppy disk and CD-ROM to critical acclaim and commercial success. Critics focused on its cartoon-style visuals and comedic elements. Day of the Tentacle has featured regularly in lists of "top" games published more than two decades after its release, and has been referenced in popular culture. A remastered version of Day of the Tentacle was developed by Schafer's current studio, Double Fine Productions, and released in March 2016, for OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Windows, with an iOS and Linux port released in July the same year, and then later for Xbox One in October 2020.

Gameplay
Day of the Tentacle follows the point-and-click two-dimensional adventure game formula, first established by the original Maniac Mansion. Players direct the controllable characters around the game world by clicking with the computer mouse. To interact with the game world, players choose from a set of nine commands arrayed on the screen (such as "pick up", "use", or "talk to") and then on an object in the world. This was the last SCUMM game to use the original interface of having the bottom of the screen being taken up by a verb selection and inventory; starting with the next game to use the SCUMM engine, Sam & Max Hit the Road, the engine was modified to scroll through a more concise list of verbs with the right mouse button and having the inventory on a separate screen.

Day of the Tentacle uses time travel extensively; early in the game, the three main protagonists are separated across time by the effects of a faulty time machine. The player, after completing certain puzzles, can then freely switch between these characters, interacting with the game's world in separate time periods. Certain small inventory items can be shared by placing the item into the "Chron-o-Johns", modified portable toilets that instantly transport objects to one of the other time periods, while other items are shared by simply leaving the item in a past time period to be picked up by a character in a future period. Changes made to a past time period will affect a future one, and many of the game's puzzles are based on the effect of time travel, the aging of certain items, and alterations of the time stream. For example, one puzzle requires the player, while in the future era where Purple Tentacle has succeeded, to send a medical chart of a Tentacle back to the past, having it used as the design of the American flag, then collecting one such flag in the future to be used as a Tentacle disguise to allow that character to roam freely.

The whole original Maniac Mansion game can be played on a computer resembling a Commodore 64 inside the Day of the Tentacle game; this practice has since been repeated by other game developers, but at the time of Day of the Tentacle's release, it was unprecedented.

Plot
Five years after the events of Maniac Mansion, Purple Tentacle—a mutant monster and lab assistant created by mad scientist Dr. Fred Edison—drinks toxic sludge from a river behind Dr. Fred's laboratory. The sludge causes him to grow a pair of flipper-like arms, develop vastly increased intelligence, and have a thirst for global domination. Dr. Fred plans to resolve the issue by killing Purple Tentacle and his harmless, friendly brother Green Tentacle, but Green Tentacle sends a plea of help to his old friend, the nerd Bernard Bernoulli. Bernard travels to the Edison family motel with his two housemates, deranged medical student Laverne and roadie Hoagie, and frees the tentacles. Purple Tentacle escapes to resume his quest to take over the world.

Since Purple Tentacle's plans are flawless and unstoppable, Dr. Fred decides to use his Chron-o-John time machines to send Bernard, Laverne, and Hoagie to the day before to turn off his Sludge-o-Matic machine, thereby preventing Purple Tentacle's exposure to the sludge. However, because Dr. Fred used an imitation diamond rather than a real diamond as a power source for the time machine, the Chron-o-Johns break down in operation. Laverne is sent 200 years in the future, where humanity has been enslaved and Purple Tentacle rules the world from the Edison mansion, while Hoagie is dropped 200 years in the past, where the motel is being used by the Founding Fathers as a retreat to write the United States Constitution. Bernard is returned to the present. To salvage Dr. Fred's plan, Bernard must acquire a replacement diamond for the time machine, while both Hoagie and Laverne must restore power to their respective Chron-o-John pods by plugging them in. To overcome the lack of electricity in the past, Hoagie recruits the help of Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Fred's ancestor, Red Edison, to build a superbattery to power his pod, while Laverne evades capture by the tentacles long enough to run an extension cord to her unit. The three send small objects back and forth in time through the Chron-o-Johns and make changes to history to help the others complete their tasks.

Eventually, Bernard uses Dr. Fred's family fortune of royalties from the use of their likeness in Maniac Mansion to purchase a real diamond, while his friends manage to power their Chron-o-Johns. Soon, the three are reunited in the present. Purple Tentacle arrives, hijacks a Chron-o-John, and takes it to the previous day to prevent them from turning off the sludge machine; he is pursued by Green Tentacle in another pod. With only one Chron-o-John pod left, Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne use it to pursue the tentacles to the previous day, while Dr. Fred uselessly tries to warn them of using the pod together, referencing the film The Fly. Upon arriving, the trio exit the pod only to discover that they have been turned into a three-headed monster, their bodies merging into one during the transfer. Meanwhile, Purple Tentacle has used the time machine to bring countless versions of himself from different moments in time to the same day to prevent the Sludge-o-Matic from being deactivated. Bernard and his friends defeat the Purple Tentacles guarding the Sludge-o-Matic, turn off the machine, and prevent the whole series of events from ever happening. Returning to the present, Dr. Fred discovers that the three have not been turned into a monster at all but have just gotten stuck in the same set of clothes; they are then ordered by Dr. Fred to get out of his house. The game ends with the credits rolling over a tentacle-shaped American flag, one of the more significant results of their tampering in history.

Development
Following a string of successful adventure games, LucasArts assigned Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer to lead development of a new game. The two had previously assisted Ron Gilbert with the creation of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, and the studio felt that Grossman and Schafer were ready to manage a project. The company believed that the pair's humor matched well with that of Maniac Mansion and suggested working on a sequel. The two developers agreed and commenced production. Gilbert and Gary Winnick, the creators of Maniac Mansion, collaborated with Grossman and Schafer on the initial planning and writing. The total budget for the game was about $600,000, according to Schafer.

Creative design
In planning the plot, the four designers considered a number of concepts, eventually choosing an idea of Gilbert's about time travel that they believed was the most interesting. The four discussed what time periods to focus on, settling on the Revolutionary War and the future. The Revolutionary War offered opportunities to craft many puzzles around that period, such as changing the Constitution to affect the future. Grossman noted the appeal of the need to make wide-sweeping changes such as the Constitution just to achieve a small personal goal, believing this captured the essence of adventure games. The future period allowed them to explore the nature of cause and effect without any historical bounds. Grossman and Schafer decided to carry over previous characters that they felt were the most entertaining. The two considered the Edison family "essential" and chose Bernard because of his "unqualified nerdiness". Bernard was considered "everyone's favorite character" from Maniac Mansion, and was the clear first choice for the protagonists. The game's other protagonists, Laverne and Hoagie, were based on a Mexican ex-girlfriend of Grossman's and a Megadeth roadie named Tony that Schafer had met, respectively. Schafer and Grossman planned to use a character selection system similar to the first game but felt that it would have complicated the design process and increased production costs. Believing that it added little to the gameplay, they removed it early in the process and reduced the number of player characters from six to three. The dropped characters included Razor, a female musician from the previous game; Moonglow, a short character in baggy clothes; and Chester, a black beat poet. Ideas for Chester, however, morphed into new twin characters in the Edison family. The smaller number of characters reduced the strain on the game's engine in terms of scripting and animation.

The staff collaboratively designed the characters. They first discussed the character personalities, which Larry Ahern used to create concept art. Ahern wanted to make sure that the art style was consistent and the character designs were established early, in contrast to what had happened with Monkey Island 2, in which various artists came in later to help fill in art assets as necessary, creating a disjointed style. Looney Tunes animation shorts, particularly the Chuck Jones-directed Rabbit of Seville, What's Opera, Doc?, and Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century inspired the artistic design. The cartoonish style also lent itself to providing larger visible faces to enable more expressive characters. Peter Chan designed backgrounds, spending around two days to progress from concept sketch to final art for each background. Chan too used Looney Tunes as influence for the backgrounds, trying to emulate the style of Jones and Maurice Noble. Ahern and Chan went back and forth with character and background art to make sure both styles worked together without too much distraction. They further had Jones visit their studio during development to provide input into their developing art. The choice of art style inspired further ideas from the designers. Grossman cited cartoons featuring Pepé Le Pew, and commented that the gag involving a painted white stripe on Penelope Pussycat inspired a puzzle in the game. The artists spent a year creating the in-game animations.

The script was written in the evening when fewer people were in the office. Grossman considered it the easiest aspect of production, but encountered difficulties when writing with others around.

Grossman and Schafer brainstormed regularly to devise the time travel puzzles and collaborated with members of the development team as well as other LucasArts employees. They would identify puzzle problems and work towards a solution similar to how the game plays. Most issues were addressed prior to programming, but some details were left unfinished to work on later. The staff conceived puzzles involving the U.S.'s early history based on their memory of their compulsory education, and using the more legendary aspects of history, such as George Washington cutting down a cherry tree to appeal to international audiences. To complete the elements, Grossman researched the period to maintain historical accuracy, visiting libraries and contacting reference librarians. The studio, however, took creative license towards facts to fit them into the game's design.

Day of the Tentacle features a four-minute-long animated opening credit sequence, the first LucasArts game to have such. Ahern noted that their previous games would run the credits over primarily still shots which would only last for a few minutes, but with Tentacle, the team had grown so large that they worried this approach would be boring to players. They assigned Kyle Balda, an intern at CalArts, to create the animated sequence, with Chan helping to create minimalist backgrounds to aid in the animation. Originally this sequence was around seven minutes long, and included the three characters arriving at the mansion and releasing Purple Tentacle. Another LucasArts designer, Hal Barwood, suggested they cut it in half, leading to the shortened version as in the released game, and having the player take over when they arrive at the mansion.

Technology and audio
Day of the Tentacle uses the SCUMM engine developed for Maniac Mansion. LucasArts had gradually modified the engine since its creation. For example, the number of input verbs was reduced and items in the character's inventory are represented by icons rather than text. While implementing an animation, the designers encountered a problem later discovered to be a limitation of the engine. Upon learning of the limitation, Gilbert reminisced about the file size of the first game. The staff then resolved to include it in the sequel.

Day of the Tentacle was the first LucasArts adventure game to feature voice work on release. The game was not originally planned to include voice work, as at the time, the install base for CD-ROM was too low. As they neared the end of 1992, CD-ROM sales grew significantly. The general manager of LucasArts, Kelly Flock, recognizing that the game would not be done in time by the end of the year to make the holiday release, suggested that the team include voice work for the game, giving them more time.

Voice director Tamlynn Barra managed that aspect of the game. Schafer and Grossman described how they imagined the characters' voices and Barra sought audition tapes of voice actors to meet the criteria. She presented the best auditions to the pair. Schafer's sister Ginny was among the auditions, and she was chosen for Nurse Edna. Schafer opted out of the decision for her selection to avoid nepotism. Grossman and Schafer encountered difficulty selecting a voice for Bernard. To aid the process, Grossman commented that the character should sound like Les Nessman from the television show WKRP in Cincinnati. Barra responded that she knew the agent of the character's actor, Richard Sanders, and brought Sanders on the project. Denny Delk and Nick Jameson were among those hired, and provided voice work for around five characters each. Recording for the 4,500 lines of dialog occurred at Studio 222 in Hollywood. Barra directed the voice actors separately from a sound production booth. She provided context for each line and described aspects of the game to aid the actors. The voice work in Day of the Tentacle was widely praised for its quality and professionalism in comparison to Sierra's talkie games of the period which suffered from poor audio quality and limited voice acting (some of which consisted of Sierra employees rather than professional talent).

The game's music was composed by Peter McConnell, Michael Land, and Clint Bajakian. The three had worked together to share the duties equally of composing the music for Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis, and continued this approach for Day of the Tentacle. According to McConnell, he had composed most of the music taking place in the game's present, Land for the future, and Bajakian for the past, outside of Dr. Fred's theme for the past which McConnell had done. The music was composed around the cartoonish nature of the gameplay, further drawing on Looney Tunes' use of parodying classical works of music, and playing on set themes for all of the major characters in the game. Many of these themes had to be composed to take into account different processing speeds of computers at the time, managed by the iMUSE music interface; such themes would include shorter repeating patterns that would play while the game's screen scrolled across, and then once the screen was at the proper place, the music would continue on to a more dramatic phrase.

Day of the Tentacle was one of the first games concurrently released on CD-ROM and floppy disk. A floppy disk version was created to accommodate consumers that had yet to purchase CD-ROM drives. The CD-ROM format afforded the addition of audible dialog. The capacity difference between the two formats necessitated alterations to the floppy disk version. Grossman spent several weeks reducing files sizes and removing files such as the audio dialog to fit the game onto six diskettes.

Reception
Day of the Tentacle was a moderate commercial success; according to Edge, it sold roughly 80,000 copies by 2009. Tim Schafer saw this as an improvement over his earlier projects, the Monkey Island games, which had been commercial flops. The game was critically acclaimed. Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World wrote in September 1993: "Calling Day of the Tentacle a sequel to Maniac Mansion ... is a little like calling the space shuttle a sequel to the slingshot". He enjoyed the game's humor and interface, and praised the designers for removing "dead end" scenarios and player character death. Ardai lauded the voice acting, writing that it "would have done the late Mel Blanc proud", and compared the game's humor, animation, and camera angles to "Looney Toons [sic] gems from the 40s and 50s". He concluded: "I expect that this game will keep entertaining people for quite some time to come". In April 1994 the magazine said of the CD version that Sanders's Bernard was among "many other inspired performances", concluding that "Chuck Jones would be proud". In May 1994 the magazine said of one multimedia kit bundling the CD version that "it packs more value into the kit than the entire software packages of some of its competitors". Sandy Petersen of Dragon stated that its graphics "are in a stupendous cartoony style", while praising its humor and describing its sound and music as "excellent". Although the reviewer considered it "one of the best" graphic adventure games, he noted that, like LucasArts' earlier Loom, it was extremely short; he wrote that he "felt cheated somehow when I finished the game". He ended the review, "Go, Lucasfilm! Do this again, but do make the next game longer!".

Phil LaRose of The Advocate called it "light-years ahead of the original", and believed that its "improved controls, sound and graphics are an evolutionary leap to a more enjoyable gaming experience". He praised the interface, and summarized the game as "another of the excellent LucasArts programs that place a higher premium on the quality of entertainment and less on the technical knowledge needed to make it run". The Boston Herald's Geoff Smith noted that "the animation of the cartoonlike characters is of TV quality", and praised the removal of dead ends and character death. He ended: "It's full of lunacy, but for anyone who likes light-hearted adventure games, it's well worth trying". Vox Day of The Blade called its visuals "well done" and compared them to those of The Ren & Stimpy Show. The writer praised the game's humor, and said that "both the music and sound effects are hilarious"; he cited the voice performance of Richard Sanders as a high point. He summarized the game as "both a good adventure and a funny cartoon".

Lim Choon Wee of the New Straits Times highly praised the game's humor, which he called "brilliantly funny". The writer commented that the game's puzzles relied on "trial and error" with "no underlying logic", but opined that the game "remains fun" despite this issue, and concluded that Day of the Tentacle was "definitely the comedy game of the year". Daniel Baum of The Jerusalem Post called it "one of the funniest, most entertaining and best-programmed computer games I have ever seen", and lauded its animation. He wrote that the game provided "a more polished impression" than either The Secret of Monkey Island or Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. The writer claimed that its high system requirements were its only drawback, and believed that a Sound Blaster card was required to fully appreciate the game. In a retrospective review, Adventure Gamers' Chris Remo wrote: "If someone were to ask for a few examples of games that exemplify the best of the graphic adventure genre, Day of the Tentacle would certainly be near the top".

Day of the Tentacle has been featured regularly in lists of "top" games. In 1994, PC Gamer US named Day of the Tentacle the 46th best computer game ever. In June 1994 it and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers won Computer Gaming World's Adventure Game of the Year award. The editors wrote that "Day of the Tentacle's fluid animation sequences underscore a strong script and solid game play ... story won out over technological innovation in this genre". In 1996, the magazine ranked it as the 34th best game of all time, writing: "DOTT completely blew away its ancestor, Maniac Mansion, with its smooth animated sequences, nifty plot and great voiceovers". Adventure Gamers included the game as the top entry on its 20 Greatest Adventure Games of All Time List in 2004, and placed it sixth on its Top 100 All-Time Adventure Games in 2011. The game has appeared on several IGN lists. The website rated it number 60 and 84 on its top 100 games list in 2005 and 2007, respectively. IGN named Day of the Tentacle as part of their top 10 LucasArts adventure games in 2009, and ranked the Purple Tentacle 82nd in a list of top 100 videogame villains in 2010. ComputerAndVideoGames.com ranked it at number 30 in 2008, and GameSpot also listed Day of the Tentacle as one of the greatest games of all time.

Legacy
Fans of Day of the Tentacle created a webcomic, The Day After the Day of the Tentacle, using the game's graphics. The 1993 LucasArts game Zombies Ate My Neighbors features a stage dedicated to Day of the Tentacle. The artists for Day of the Tentacle shared office space with the Zombies Ate My Neighbors development team. The team included the homage after frequently seeing artwork for Day of the Tentacle during the two games' productions. In describing what he considered "the most rewarding moment" of his career, Grossman stated that the game's writing and use of spoken and subtitled dialog assisted a learning-disabled child in learning how to read. Telltale Games CEO Dan Connors commented in 2009 that an episodic game based on Day of the Tentacle was "feasible", but depended on the sales of the Monkey Island games released that year.

In 2018, a fan-made sequel, Return of the Tentacle, was released free by a team from Germany. The game imitates the art style of the Remastered edition and features full voice acting.

Special Edition
According to Kotaku, a remastered version of Day of the Tentacle was in the works at LucasArts Singapore before the sale of LucasArts to Disney in 2012. Though never officially approved, the game used a pseudo-3D art style and was nearly 80% complete, according to one person close to the project, but was shelved in the days before the closure of LucasArts.

Remastered
A remastered version of Day of the Tentacle was developed by Schafer and his studio, Double Fine Productions. The remaster was released on March 22, 2016, for OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Windows, with a Linux version released at July 11 together with a mobile port for iOS. The PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions are cross-buy and also feature cross-save. An Xbox One port came in October 2020. The remastered game was released as a free PlayStation Plus title for the month of January 2017.

Schafer credited both LucasArts and Disney for help in creating the remaster, which follows from a similar remastering of Grim Fandango, as well by Double Fine, in January 2015. Schafer said when they originally were about to secure the rights to Grim Fandango from LucasArts to make the remaster, they did not originally have plans to redo the other LucasArts adventure games, but with the passionate response they got on the news of the Grim Fandango remaster, they decided to continue these efforts. Schafer described getting the rights to Day of the Tentacle a "miracle" though aided by the fact that many of the executives in the legal rights chain had fond memories of playing these games and helped to secure the rights. 2 Player Productions, which has worked before with Double Fine to document their game development process, also created a mini-documentary for Day of the Tentacle Remastered, which included a visit to the Skywalker Ranch, where LucasArts games were originally developed, where much of the original concept art and digital files for the game and other LucasArts adventure games were archived.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered retains its two-dimensional cartoon-style art, redrawn at a higher resolution for modern computers. The high resolution character art was updated by a team led by Yujin Keim with the consultation of Ahern and Chan. Keim's team used many of the original sketches of characters and assets from the two and emulated their style with improvements for modern graphics systems. Matt Hansen worked on recreating the background assets in high resolution. As with the Grim Fandango remaster, the player can switch back and forth between the original graphics and the high-resolution version. The game includes a more streamlined interaction menu, a command wheel akin to the approach used in Broken Age, but the player can opt to switch back to the original interface. The game's soundtrack has been redone within MIDI adapted to work with the iMUSE system. There is an option to listen to commentary from the original creators, including Schafer, Grossman, Chan, McConnell, Ahern, and Bajakian. The remaster contains the fully playable version of the original Maniac Mansion, though no enhancements have been made to that game-within-a-game.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered has received positive reviews, with the PC version having an aggregate review score of 87/100 tallied by Metacritic. Reviewers generally praised the game as having not lost its charm since its initial release, but found some aspects of the remastering to be lackluster. Richard Corbett for Eurogamer found the game "every bit as well crafted now as it was in 1993", but found the processes used to provide high-definition graphics from the original 16-bit graphics to making some of the required shortcuts taken in 1993 for graphics, such as background dithering and low animation framerates, more obvious on modern hardware. IGN's Jared Petty also found the remastered to still be enjoyable, and found the improvement on the graphics to be "glorious", but worried that the lack of a hint system, as was added in The Secret of Monkey Island remastered version, would put off new players to the game. Bob Mackey for USgamer found that while past remastered adventure games have highlighted how much has changed in gamers' expectations since the heyday of adventure games in the 1990s, Day of the Tentacle Remastered "rises above these issues to become absolutely timeless".

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Day of the Tentacle