Disney’s hyperealism animation aesthetic is far-meaning and has a great impact on hundreds and thousands of animations. Following with Disneys’ footsteps, many studios and artists applied the 12 principles of animation and the use of traditional filmmaking workflow to their works. However, there is still a small number of animations which didn’t followed these rules but still got great results. Animation Waltz with Bashir is just one of them.
Waltz with Bashir
Waltz with Bashir is a 2008 Israeli adult animated war documentary drama film written, produced and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman in search of his lost memories of his experience as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War.
Animators took four years to complete this film. It combines classical 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 feeling of the film, used a unique style invented by Yoni Goodman at the Bridgit Folman Film Gang studio in Israel. The technique is often confused with rotoscoping, which is an animation style that uses paintings over live footage, but is actually a combination of Adobe Flash cutouts and classic animation. All animations were done with a technique called Cut Art. Unlike classic animation where animators draw each frame all over again, animators of Waltz with Bashir disassembled the original illustrations into hundreds of pieces. Artists then animate them by simply moving these parts to create the illusion of movement. By using this unique technique, charactors are able to show rich facial expressions and movements.
Unlike traditional animation working pipeline, the film was first shot in a sound studio as a 90-minute video and then transferred into a storyboard. After that, nearly 2,300 original illustrations were drawn based on the storyboard, which together formed the actual film scenes using Flash animation, classic 2D animation, and 3D technologies.
Waltz with Bashir is a slow paced animation documatary film with yards of dialogue, which shows an special animation editing that is quite different from Disney’s. Thanks for animators’ hard work, people can enjoy a new style animation and a serious, thought-provoking story.