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

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.