Narrative visualization transforms data into engaging stories, making complex information accessible to a broad audience. Foundation models, with their advanced capabilities such as natural language processing, content generation, and multimodal integration, hold substantial potential for enriching narrative visualization. Recently, a collection of techniques have been introduced for crafting narrative visualizations based on foundation models from different aspects. We build our survey upon 66 articles to study how foundation models can progressively engage in this process and then propose a reference model categorizing the reviewed literature into four essential phases: Analysis, Narration, Visualization, and Interaction. Furthermore, we identify eight specific tasks (e.g., Insight Extraction and Authoring) where foundation models are applied across these stages to facilitate the creation of visual narratives. Detailed descriptions, related literature, and reflections are presented for each task. To make it a more impactful and informative experience for diverse readers, we discuss key research problems and provide the strengths and weaknesses in each task to guide people in identifying and seizing opportunities while navigating challenges in this field.

In recent years, narrative visualization has gained much attention. Researchers have proposed different design spaces for various narrative visualization genres and scenarios to facilitate the creation process. As users' needs grow and automation technologies advance, increasingly more tools have been designed and developed. In this study, we summarized six genres of narrative visualization (annotated charts, infographics, timelines & storylines, data comics, scrollytelling & slideshow, and data videos) based on previous research and four types of tools (design spaces, authoring tools, ML/AI-supported tools and ML/AI-generator tools) based on the intelligence and automation level of the tools. We surveyed 105 papers and tools to study how automation can progressively engage in visualization design and narrative processes to help users easily create narrative visualizations. This research aims to provide an overview of current research and development in the automation involvement of narrative visualization tools. We discuss key research problems in each category and suggest new opportunities to encourage further research in the related domain.