In 1982, Ari Folman was a 19-year-old infantry soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. 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.
He tells Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there's a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties
Ari 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.
Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself. He converses with friends, a psychologist and the reporter Ron Ben-Yishai who was in Beirut at the time.
As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images …

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.

The Israelian-German-French coproduction WALTZ WITH BASHIR is the first animated documentary film in the history of cinema using animation technique. In fact, the use of animation to tell a documentary was invented for this film. First, a full-length screenplay was written based on the research, then the entire screenplay was shot in a studio. It included interviews with the film's characters and basic dramatizing of the interviews accounts so that the animators will be able to perform their work accurately. This film was edited as a full-length video movie. Following test screenings and approval of the video version, the video was broken down into a detailed and precise storyboard. The storyboard drawings later became a video board (so-called animatic). The animatic was reedited and was screened on the big screen in order to examine the essence of the drama and the film's theme. Only after the animatic was approved, it was broken down once again into individual illustrations, drawn by leading illustrators in Israel and abroad.
Only then the final illustrations were animated. The process was indeed Sisyphean and exhausting, but there was no possible way of shortening the process while ensuring a final product that would uphold both quality animation and exceptionally credible documentary narrative precision.

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 only part of the film which wasn't made by means of animation is a short segment at the very end of the film which shows the documented results of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in a 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. 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.
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.
The graphic novel genre, in particular Joe Sacco, the novels Catch-22, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson and Slaughterhouse-Five^[9] and painter Otto Dix 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.

The film contains both fictional composites of real life figures and actual living people.
· Ari Folman as himself, an Israeli filmmaker who recently finished his military reserve service. Some twenty years before, he served in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War.
· Miki Leon as Boaz Rein-Buskila, an Israeli 1982 Lebanon War-veteran accountant suffering from nightmares.
· Ori Sivan as himself, an Israeli filmmaker who previously co-directed two films with Folman and is his long-time friend.
· Yehezkel Lazarov as Carmi Cna'an, an Israeli 1982 Lebanon War-veteran who once was Folman's friend and now lives in the Netherlands.
· Ronny Dayag as himself, an Israeli 1982 Lebanon War-veteran high food engineer.
· Shmuel Frenkel as himself, an Israeli 1982 Lebanon War-veteran. During this war he was the commander of an infantry unit.
· Zahava Solomon as herself, an Israeli psychologist and researcher in the field of psychological trauma.
· Ron Ben-Yishai as himself, an Israeli journalist who was the first to cover the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
· Dror Harazi as himself, an Israeli 1982 Lebanon War-veteran. During this war he commanded a tank brigade stationed outside the Shatila refugee camp.

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.
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.
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 for writing and for directing in an animated feature production

Ari Folman
In the mid 1980s, after completing his military service, Ari Folman ventured out on his dream trip to circle the world with a backpack. Just two weeks and two countries into the trip, Ari realized traveling was not for him, so he settled into small guesthouses in Southeast Asia and wrote letters to his friends at home, letters in which he totally fabricated the perfect trip. One whole year of being in one place and writing down the fruits of his fantastical imagination convinced him to return home and study cinema.
His graduate film, COMFORTABLY NUMB (1991) documented Ari's close friends taking cover on the verge of anxiety attacks during the first Gulf war while Iraqi missiles landed all over Tel Aviv. The result was comical and absurd and the film won the Israeli Academy award for Best Documentary.
Between 1991-1996 Ari directed documentary specials for TV, mainly in the occupied territories. In 1996 he wrote and directed SAINT CLARA, a feature film based on a novel by Czech author Pavel Kohout. The film won seven Israeli Academy awards, including Best Director and Best Film. SAINT CLARA opened the Berlin Film Festival's Panorama and won the People's Choice Award. The film was screened throughout America and Europe to critical acclaim. Ari continued directing successful documentary series and took time off for his second feature in 2001. MADE IN ISRAEL is a futuristic fantasy that centers upon the pursuit of the world's only remaining Nazi. Ari has written for several successful Israeli TV series, including the award-winning IN TREATMENT ("Be Tipul"), which was the basis for the new HBO series of the same name.
Ari made his initial attempt at animation in his series THE MATERIAL THAT LOVE IS MADE OF - each episode opens with five minutes of documentary animation which depicts scientists presenting their theories on the evolution of love. This successful attempt at documentary animation propelled Ari to develop the unique format of WALTZ WITH BASHIR.
Based on a true story, the film is a quest into the director's memory for the missing pieces from the days of the Lebanon War in the mid 80s. As far as Ari was concerned, it was only natural to transform the quest into animation, full of imagination and fantasy.

THE ART OF ANIMATION

THE ART OF WORLD CINEMA

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