Memory Drawn into the Present: Waltz with Bashir and Animated Documentary

Abstract

The international success of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) saw this work routinely defined and discussed as the first feature-length example of animated documentary cinema. This chapter analyses Folman’s film and the multidisciplinary body of scholarly response that it has provoked. Much response to Folman’s film evaluates it in isolation and speculates more ambitiously on animated documentary’s possible aesthetic, conceptual and ethical strengths and weaknesses as a distinctive mode of audio-visual practice. This chapter’s analysis of Folman’s film likewise identifies defining formal and thematic characteristics that drive the contemporary turn towards animated documentary filmmaking more generally. This chapter also identifies several main evolving concepts and debates that characterise animated documentary scholarship as a distinctive subset of Animation Studies and Film Studies. Finally, this chapter also identifies other academic disciplines – such as Memory Studies and Trauma Studies – within which significant discussion of animated documentary is also taking place.

The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution

“…In the last two decades, animation studies has witnessed a growing interest in animated documentary, an animated form that works with factual content. This trend inspired vibrant conversations about animated documentary's representational, political, and social aspects, producing such volumes as Animated Realism: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre (Kriger, 2011), Animated Documentary (Honess Roe, 2013), Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema (Murray and Ehrlich, 2018), and Animating Truth: Documentary and Visual Culture in the 21st Century (Ehrlich, 2021). Despite this apparent proliferation of literature, the history of this animated mode, as Cristina Formenti rightly points out in her book The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution, remains largely underrepresented in animation scholarship (p. 3).…”