Waltz with Bashir (2008) opens with a strange and powerful image: a pack of ferocious dogs running headlong through the streets of Tel Aviv, overturning tables and terrifying pedestrians, converging beneath a building’s window to growl at a man standing there. It turns out that this man, Boaz, is an old friend of Ari Folman, the film’s director and protagonist. Like Folman, he was a teenager in the Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And the pack of menacing dogs is his recurring nightmare, a nightly vision he links to the many village guard dogs he shot — so they wouldn’t raise the alarm — as his platoon made its way through southern Lebanon.
The pack of growling dogs — animal Furies — is a striking embodiment of the violence of repressed memories, the fear and anger involved in confronting a shameful past. The rest of the film tries to answer the question posed by this opening nightmare — what memories is this former soldier, and by extension Israeli society, pursued by? What is he guilty of?
Shooting Film and Crying
I’ve already written about my reaction to the Israeli animated film “Waltz with Bashir.” If you’re interested in a more in-depth analysis, you can check out a longer piece I have just published at MERIP. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Good piece, Ursula, but just to be nitpicky, I think if you look for interviews with the animators, they say explicitly that the film was not rotoscoped. It looks visually like Linklater’s films, but was actually created using “pure” animation techniques (yes, in the cartooning world, rotoscoping is a ideological question).
Excellent review, and mabrouk on the publication!!
We just saw the film last night, and I had the same impressions as you about the absence of Palestinians/Lebanese most of the time in the surreal empty dream-like landscape (particularly the casual occupation of ’empty’ Lebanese houses and villas – “I had an apartment in Beirut” as if he sublet it on Craigslist), though I suppose that could be put down to the fact that it was how the protagonist remembered things.
My larger discomfort was with the question of psychological “dissociation” (the psych/memory framing device was rather plodding though) – if the point of the whole film was to go back and uncover what really happened, and to return the protagonist to the reality of his involvement in it, then the insistence on painting the massacre as something carried out by phalangists alone and the Israelis as almost UN-like observers who were there merely to provide “cover” seems to be the ultimate act of dissociation. If one didn’t know from history that the Israelis had military reasons and interests in going into the camps, one certainly wouldn’t think it from the film.
Thanks for mentioning that Ethan, I am not really familiar with the techniques. I thought rotoscoping was when you animated footage of live actors. Is there another term for that? And nice to hear from you!
And SP, thank you very much! I think you make a very interesting point about dissociation. I’m not sure how much the psychological processes referenced are to be taken as realistic or as narrative framing devices.
u.
Hey Ursula-
So, rotoscoping is indeed as you describe, drawing on top of footage of live actors. Many many animators feel it and other “motion capture” techniques are “cheating.” That helps explain the vehemence with which Yoni Goodman, the chief animator of Waltz (and the one who did the Gaza animation you posted earlier) explains that there was no rotoscoping in his film. From an interview:
http://www.designfederation.net/interviews/yoni-goodman/
“We used a Flash cutouts animation technique specially designed for this project for all parts of the animation, sometimes slightly adding traditional animation to the process. we also used very few shots using 3d, but only for camera movements and such. There was absolutely no Rotoscope animation throughout the entire project. Every time someone mentions rotoscope I get angry calls from my animators in the middle of the night.”
[…] Two quibbles: the translation of Nagib Mahfouz’s Awlad Haritna is “Children of the Alley” (not “The Sons of the Medina”). And while I’m sure there has been interest in the Israeli animated feature “Waltz with Bashir,” I am suspicious of claims that it has “became an instant classic in the very Palestinian camps it depicts, because it is the only history the younger generation has,” a claim that keeps getting repeated in the Western media..oh, if only the Arab governments wouldn’t censore the movie, oppressing young Palestinians with a thirst for history (of which they have none) and understanding! (You can read my take on “Waltz with Bashir” here.) […]
Dear Ursula,
I know I’m really late on this one, but I just came across your article at MERIP after seeing the film myself a few days ago. Thank you for such a well-written piece that both connected to some of the frustrations that I had been feeling and re-focused discussion on what this film really communicates: the “final irony”, as you describe, is that the film’s “redemptive message” actually contributes more toward restricting any honest acknowledgment of responsibility for, or even the existence of, any of these or other crimes committed by Israel.
Thank you for writing it — I’m passing it along to everyone I know!