| Waltz with Bashir | |
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Theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Ari Folman |
| Produced by | Ari Folman Serge Lalou Gerhard Meixner Yael Nahlieli Roman Paul |
| Written by | Ari Folman |
| Starring | Ari Folman |
| Music by | Max Richter |
| Editing by | Nili Feller |
| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Classics Bridgit Folman Film Gang Les Films d'Ici Razor Film Produktion GmbH |
| Release date(s) | May 13, 2008 (Cannes) June 5, 2008 (Israel) |
| Running time | 86 minutes |
| Country | Israel |
| Language | Hebrew |
| Budget | $2 million[1] |
| Box office | $11,125,849 |
Waltz with Bashir (Hebrew: ואלס עם באשיר, translit. Vals Im Bashir) is a 2008 Israeli animated documentary film written and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman in search of his lost memories from the 1982 Lebanon War.[2][3][4]
This film and $9.99, also released in 2008, are the first Israeli animated feature-length films released in movie theaters since Alina and Yoram Gross's Ba'al Hahalomot (1962). Waltz with Bashir premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it entered the competition for the Palme d'Or, and since then has won and been nominated for many additional important awards while receiving wide acclaim from critics. It won a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, an NSFC Award for Best Film, a César Award for Best Foreign Film and an IDA Award for Feature Documentary, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature.
Despite the popularity of the film and success of private screenings, it is officially banned in Lebanon.[5]
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In 1982, Ari Folman was a 19-year-old infantry soldier in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In 2006, he meets with a friend from his army service period, who tells him of the nightmares connected to his experiences from the Lebanon War. Folman is surprised to find that he does not remember a thing from that period. Later that night he has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the reality of which he is unable to tell. In his memory, he and his soldier friends are bathing at night by the seaside in Beirut under the light of flares descending over the city. Folman rushes off to meet another friend from his army service, who advises him to discuss it with other people who were in Beirut at the same time in order to understand what happened there and to revive his own memories. Folman converses with friends, a psychologist and the reporter Ron Ben-Yishai, who was in Beirut at the time. Folman realizes that he "was in the second or third ring" of soldiers surrounding the camp, and that he was among those soldiers firing flares into the sky to illuminate the camp for the militia carrying out the massacre inside. He concludes that his amnesia stems from his feeling, at the age of 19, that he was as guilty of the massacre as those who actually carried it out. The film ends with animation dissolving into actual footage of the aftermath of the massacre.
The film contains both fictional composites of real life figures and actual living people.
The film takes its title from a scene in which Shmuel Frenkel, one of the interviewees and the commander of Folman's infantry unit at the time of the film's events, grabs a light machine gun and "dances an insane waltz" (to the tune of Chopin's Waltz in C Sharp) amid heavy enemy fire on a Beirut street festooned with huge posters of Bashir Gemayel. Thematically, the film's title is a symbolic description of the "Waltz", which is a dance for couple, that Folman is "Dancing" with his memories from the war in Lebanon.
The film took four years to complete. It is unusual in it being a feature-length documentary made almost entirely by the means of animation. It combines classical music, 1980s music, realistic graphics, and surrealistic scenes together with illustrations similar to comics. The entire film is animated, excluding one short segment of news archive footage.
The animation, with its dark hues representing the overall feel of the film, uses a unique style invented by Yoni Goodman at the Bridgit Folman Film Gang studio in Israel. The technique is often confused with rotoscoping, an animation style that uses drawings over live footage, but is actually a combination of Adobe Flash cutouts and classic animation.[6] Each drawing was sliced into hundreds of pieces which were moved in relation to one another, thus creating the illusion of movement. The film was first shot in a sound studio as a 90-minute video and then transferred to a storyboard. From there 2,300 original illustrations were drawn based on the storyboard, which together formed the actual film scenes using Flash animation, classic animation, and 3D technologies.[7]
The original soundtrack was composed by minimalist electronic musician Max Richter while the featured songs are by OMD ("Enola Gay"), PiL ("This is Not a Love Song"), Navadei Haucaf ("Good Morning Lebanon", written for the movie), The Clique ("Incubator"), and Zeev Tene (a remake of the Cake song "I Bombed Korea", retitled "Beirut"). Some reviewers have viewed the music as playing an active role as commentator on events instead of simple accompaniment.[8]
The comics medium, in particular Joe Sacco,[9] the novels Catch-22, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, and Slaughterhouse-Five,[10] and painter Otto Dix[11] were mentioned by Folman and art director David Polonsky as influences on the film. The film itself was adapted into a graphic novel in 2009.[12]
indieWire named the film the tenth best of the year, based on the site's annual survey of 100 film critics.[13] Xan Brooks of The Guardian called it "an extraordinary, harrowing, provocative picture."[14] The film was praised for "inventing a new cinematographic language" at the Tokyo Filmex festival.[15] Despite the positive critical reception, the film was only moderately commercially successful in Israel itself.[3] However, a recent Haaretz poll has called Waltz with Bashir the third favorite film of all time among Israelis.[16]
American Documentarian Alex Gibney called the film "The documentary from the last 10 years he is most jealous of" in an answer to that question during a podcast with Bill Simmons, saying "It took a subject that on the face of it, the Sabra and Shatila massacre... it was a long time ago, who cares about it now and it's very grisly, but it took this idea of soldiers haunted by something, and imagined it in an animation way, and so you are slowly coming around to the subject, and recognizing it like a memory that has been lost, and so you are now recovering until the very end of the film, suddenly this animated film goes to real life footage, and you realize, OK, I've recovered the memory and now I remember the horror. It was just a really really powerful film. That was something, just knocked my socks off that one."[17]
Israeli newspaper Haaretz correspondent Gideon Levy has stated that the film is "stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful - but propaganda" for portraying Israel and the IDF in a too positive light. He labels it a "charade," and as "(...) an act of fraud and deceit (...)".[4] The Nation viewed the film's depiction of the events as disturbingly realistic and timely, lamenting that "Israel of today is not Ari Folman's. It is Avigdor Lieberman's and Benjamin Netanyahu's".[16] Commentary called the film both "emotionally powerful" and "intellectually shallow" due to its "murky ambiguity" about the IDF's role in the massacre. The otherwise positive review also concludes with a note of frustration at the lack of context for the events depicted and cynicism about the shallow breastbeating of the narrative: "What terrible things Israel has done— and how wonderful it is to have souls sensitive enough to admit it."[3] The comparisons drawn between SS behavior during the Holocaust and IDF's behavior during the massacre by a character in the film is particularly controversial. Commentary remarked that:
"As vilely anti-Semitic as it is to compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis, it is perfectly natural for Israelis to think of the Holocaust in certain situations, because they, unlike other peoples, still live in the Holocaust’s shadow."[3]
However, Pajamas Media writer John Rosenthal called the scenes "wildly overblown" and "an obvious logical howler".[18]
English musician PJ Harvey cited the film as a major influence on her 2011 album Let England Shake. [19]
The film is banned in some Arab countries (including Lebanon), with the most harsh critics in Lebanon, as the movie depicts a vague and violent time in Lebanon's history. A movement of bloggers, among them the Lebanese Inner Circle, +961 and others have rebelled against the Lebanese government's ban of the movie, and have managed to get the movie seen by local Lebanese critics, in defiance of their government's request on banning it. The film was privately screened in January 2009 in Beirut in front of 90 people.[5] Since then many screenings have taken place. Pirated copies are sold everywhere in the country. Folman saw the screening as a source of great pride:
| “ | I was overwhelmed and excited. I wish I could have been there. I wish one day I'll be able to present the film myself in Beirut. For me, it will be the happiest day of my life.[20] | ” |
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008.[21]
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It was also ranked #34 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010,[22] and #4 in Current TV's "50 Documentaries to See Before You Die" in 2011.
Waltz with Bashir became the first animated film to have received a nomination for either an Academy Award or a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It also became first Israeli Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film winner since The Policeman (1971), and the first documentary film to win the award.[23] It was unsuccessfully submitted for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature nomination, and became ineligible for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature when the Academy announced its new rule to nominate only documentaries which have had a qualifying run in both New York and Los Angeles by August 31.[24] The film was also included in the National Board of Review's Top Foreign Films list. Ari Folman won the WGA's Best Documentary Feature Screenplay award and the DGA's Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary award for creating the film. Folman also received nominations for Annie Awards and BAFTA Awards for Best Animated Feature, but lost both award to Kung Fu Panda and WALL-E.
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| Awards | ||
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| Preceded by There Will Be Blood |
NSFC Award for Best Film 2008 |
Succeeded by The Hurt Locker |
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