Author: Mara L.

In his commentary on Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman says that animated drawings are no less real than movie images with actors. Folman talks about his experience raising money for the film. He went to a festival in Canada where he pitched the project to people from the industry. Almost everyone said that he should make a regular movie. Drawings, people thought, simply aren’t the real thing, and an audience wouldn’t be able to connect to them.

I am a hundred percent on Folman’s side. What’s so real about an actor, artificial lighting, a crew of technicians, and so on, and the resulting projection/pixels on a screen? Nothing. That kind of ‘reality’ was anyway never the point. What matters is reality in a different sense: images that evoke in people a connection with the experiences of others, a connection that enables them to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and to see that this point of view isn’t altogether unrelated to their own lives. Drawings, for me, can be very real, at least if they are done as in Waltz With Bashir.

Interestingly, the protagonists and even the minor characters in Waltz With Bashir are, in some sense, real people: they are friends and acquaintances and team members, video-taped and then drawn. But Folman didn’t simply convert video-tapes into animation. He took the characters and developed them. In his monochromatic color schemes, the characters become more rather than less real. Yellow is how hard it is to go through things. Orange is how wild and crazy it is. Blue is how much it might as well have been a dream. Or the other way around. Anyway, I continue to be a fan of Waltz With Bashir: five stars*****!

I watched Waltz With Bashir all over again, with Ari Folman’s commentary. There are so many things in the movie that speak to me, I decided I would ask Jens to make this into a little series on Notes From Nowhere.

Here’s one thing that interests me: the nature of flaws in art. In his commentary, Folman explains that the animation bears the signs of a low budget. Things don’t move in a natural way. This is less of a problem when rapid action is going on: even the limited animation they could afford will make it seem realistic. But when things slow down, bits of movement seem too rapid, too slow, too abrupt, too angular, and so on.

Before I listened to Folman’s commentary, I was certain that this effect was intentional. In my mind, the movie is a work of art, and I guess I don’t like the idea that anything about a work of art isn’t intentional — or rather, the idea that the unintentional isn’t somehow incorporated into the intentional. In the case of Waltz With Bashir, I would have thought that Folman wanted the dreamy, surreal atmosphere that emerges in slow-moving scenes. It doesn’t look real, but why should it? Isn’t this what the movie is about, that memory plays all kinds of tricks on us? There’s not just the phenomenon of suppressing traumatic events. There are also the manifold ways in which one can ‘remember’ things that never happened, in which images float through our minds, and in which the real and the imagined get mixed up with each other. If I could talk to Folman, I would try to talk him into embracing this feature of the movie more than he does… to be continued.

Waltz With Bashir is an animated movie by Ari Folman. It reminds me: I spent my youth drawing animals. Waltz With Bashir starts with an incredible scene. Dogs that look like death are running through the streets and the movie says “death, death, death.” The dogs are orange and black and horrible and you know: this is a place where you don’t want to be, but it’s also a place where you want to be, because you (sort of) want to find out what’s going on. That’s the leitmotif. A guy does and does not want to remember what happened.

Waltz With Bashir is not your typical anti-war movie. It doesn’t aim to get clear about the who-did-what, and no particular person of power is singled out as evil-doer. Instead, the movie is about the perspectives of soldiers who have to take it day by day, and who end up traumatized. The protagonist realizes that his memories of the Lebanon War in the 1980s have holes. The film assumes that the human mind will suppress things — a way to survive and something to revisit later on in life. No big fanfare. This is how it is, the film suggests, in all kinds of wars, for all kinds of generations. As personal as the perspective of the narrator is, this easily translates into a general claim, and a chilling one.

That being said, my interest in the movie is first and foremost artistic. It’s a work of art, and it makes me wish I could apply for Ari Folman’s next movie as illustrator. Perhaps he shall take me and Jens on his team, given that Jens is moving to drawings now and that I spent my earlier life sketching… to be continued.