Trailer
Plot summary
In 2006, Ari meets Boaz, a friend who describes a nightmare: 26 dogs race through Tel Aviv toward his home. Boaz ties the dream to the 1982 Lebanon War, where his unit, knowing he could not kill a person, gave him the task of shooting dogs during a night infiltration so they would not alert a village. He remembers each of the 26. Ari also served in that war, as an infantry soldier, and is startled to recall none of his deployment. That night he envisions his younger self and two soldiers bathing in the Mediterranean off Beirut as flares fall over the city. He links the image to the Sabra and Shatila massacre but cannot place it in context. A therapist friend urges him to track down people who had been in Beirut, and he begins interviewing veterans.
Cast
- Ori Sivanas Himself - Interviewee (voice)
- Ronny Dayagas Himself - Interviewee (voice)
- Shmuel Frenkelas Himself - Interviewee (voice)
- Zahava Solomonas Herself - Interviewee (voice) (as Prof. Zahava Solomon)
- Dror Harazias Himself - Interviewee (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Banned in Lebanon and other Arab countries, Waltz with Bashir was screened privately in Beirut in January 2009 for 90 people in defiance of the government's ban, after bloggers including the Lebanese Inner Circle and +961 campaigned against it.
- The film's distinctive look was a style invented by animator Yoni Goodman at the Bridgit Folman Film Gang studio in Israel: often mistaken for rotoscoping, it actually combined Adobe Flash cutouts with classic animation, each drawing sliced into hundreds of pieces moved against one another.
- Waltz with Bashir was the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and, after France's Persepolis, only the second for the Golden Globe. It was also the first R-rated animated film considered for those honours and the first documentary ever to win the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
- Waltz with Bashir was the first Israeli feature-length animated film released theatrically since Joseph the Dreamer in 1962.
- Waltz with Bashir began as a 90-minute video of live-action footage shot in a sound studio, which was turned into storyboards and animatics and then 2,300 illustrations that became the finished scenes through Flash, classic and 3D animation.
