Waltz with Bashir is an Israeli feature-length animated documentary film released in 2008 and written and directed by Ari Folman. It was one of the first two feature length animated films from Israel.
Core Premise:
This film revolves around Ari Folman, a veteran of the Israeli Defence League in the 1982 Lebanon war, trying to remember the events that happened he had forgotten about or suppressed. This search is triggered when he meets his old friend from that period of time who is having trouble dealing with the events that happened. Folman can't remember the events but has a 'vision' after seeing his old friend. Though this vision isn't clear to him so he begins to search for answers to try and remember his suppressed memories by talking to people who were also veterans of the war and might have been in the same places as him. The memories he found to have suppressed were regarding the Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Israeli forces lit up the camps with flares allowing the Christian Lebanese Phalange Militia to carry out a massacre on Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites. This is quite a controversial part of the war, as although the IDF weren't directly responsible for the massacre they were complacent in its happening and it wasn't really recognised for its atrocities until years after. The film explores Folman's guilt at allowing the gruesome massacre to happen.
Authors:
Walts with Bashir was written and directed by Ari Folman as well as Folman being the main character of the film. It was his first animated film but not his first piece of filmography. His first notable piece of work was his documentary Sha'anan Si, released in 1991. Through his career he has directed live action fiction, documentaries and animations. It can be seen that Waltz with Bashir was Folman's way of addressing his own feelings from the war and exploring how others saw the war and if others had the same guilt that he had over the massacres.
Production:
The animation for this is purely based around the voices. Before starting any of the animation all the voices had been recorded for the entire video. It uses a graphic novel style of drawing with 3d elements. Because of this mix of styles the film has often been confused with rotoscoping which is quite understandable. When watching the film the style reminded me of something in between Archer and A Scanner Darkly, so I originally thought that every few frames had been rotoscoped then animated in between, but it turns out a lot of it was made Adobe Flash, which explains why the film took 4 years to animate. It is unusual for an entire documentary to be animated as it's just rarely done. However it is clear that this style provides a lot for the format of this documentary, being able to cut seamlessly between present day and the war, while showing how he was suppressing his true memories of the war and was essentially in denial. In one scene he arrives at the Beirut Airport and believes it is a fully functioning airport full of tourists, active plane departures and plentiful shops, but then he realises the airport is largely in ruins, all the planes are wrecked and the stores looted. Being able to slip seamlessly between these two is one of the benefits of this animation style.
Reception:
Waltz with Bashir received largely positive reviews, with many critics seeing the film as original and innovative, with many citing the animation style over a documentary format as the reason for its innovation. The film was produced by a fairly small production company on a fairly small budget of $2million, while it managed to gross over $10million worldwide, showing that it was a success for a seemingly low budget animated feature-length film. The animation style invented by Yoni Goodman, of the animation studio responsible, was widely praised by critics for its effectiveness in this format.
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