David Polonsky was born in 1973, in Kiev, and his family emigrated to Israel in 1981. In addition to his freelance art and design, he also teaches at his alma mater, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. A few years ago, he was approached by director Ari Folman to do art design on a film he was working on, an animated documentary called Waltz With Bashir.
The resulting film has been a huge hit on the festival circuit, and has been widely compared to Marjane Satrapi's award-winning 2007 film Persepolis. Sony Pictures Classics, Persepolis' distributor, upped the comparison by picking up Waltz With Bashir as well.
Suite 101 sat down with Polonsky during the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and discussed his work on the film, his artistic influences, and some of the controversial decisions they made on the film.
How did you get involved with Waltz With Bashir?
“I previously worked with Ari Folman on short animation clips for a documentary series called The Material That Love Is Made Of. When he saw he could work very well with animation, he had this idea for the film, and he approached me to work with Yoni Goodman, the director of animation, recruiting the animators, buying the computers, all that stuff.”
What was the medium for Waltz With Bashir? Was it done in Flash?
“Yes. All of the character animation was done in Flash. The characters were sketched and scanned in Photoshop, then copied into Flash and dismembered into hundreds of tiny pieces to allow for complicated movement, while the backgrounds were Photoshop that were exposed to after-effects, and then the whole film was given a thick layer of after-effects. And there was a little bit of 3-D (CGI).”
When I mentioned to some animators that this movie was done in Flash, they just about lost their minds. Why Flash? Why not CGI?
“Budget. Not CGI because we were not looking for the slick look, it had to have this drawn quality to it. I think the question would be: why not classical (cel) animation, why not frame-by-frame? And the simple answer is time and budget. The Israeli animation market is really, really small, so we had to come up with a way to do this film very easily and cheaply. The total budget for this film is about $2 million, which for an animated feature, is hilarious.”
Would you have preferred to do Waltz With Bashir in cel?
“I don’t know, it’s hard to imagine in retrospect, because of course the animation would have been more fluid, and there would have been many things we could have done because it’s a really rich technique and it has a lot of . But then again, it would have been much harder to go back and fix things. I don’t know: I kind of grew accustomed to the mistakes and everything as it is; I wouldn’t have done it any different.”
What were some of your artistic touchstones for this film? What inspired you?
“Because the film deals with real stories, it was important not to stylize it too much. You might call the style realistic, or you might call it objective, although it’s completely not objective. But all the influences are very subtle. To name but a few I would say, European illustration from the beginning of the 20th Century, stuff that appeared in Simplissimus, German expressionism, those guys . . .”
Some specific artists? People you admired?
“I’m blanking out! (laughs) Otto Dix, the German guys from the 1920’s. Some Japanese prints like Hokusai . . . but it’s hard to find the direct influences. When I look at the film now, it seems to me more influenced by comics, graphic novels, which isn’t the background that I’m coming from.
“I’ve been working for the past year on an adaptation for graphic novel, to be published by Metropolitan Press in New York. It will be interesting to see how this will be accepted next to DC Comics, against the American graphic novel style.”
There’s one point in Waltz With Bashir where you jump out of animation into live-action; some would argue that this scene felt manipulative, that you were going for the club moment. How would you address that accusation?
“I can understand this remark; it’s not completely out of line. Yes, it is very manipulative, but we needed strong means to track the viewer back from – I dare say – pretty pictures. If, at the end of the film, you see drawings of bodies, and it looks beautiful, it takes away from the impact. Even in the strongest of Impressionist paintings. But you cannot say the same thing about photographs. We needed to have this very strong distinction.
“We debated for a very long time about the exact moment in the film where the real footage will appear. At some point, it was in the beginning of the last part of the film, because it seemed too obvious to put it at the end, be too blunt. (slaps hands together) But eventually, this solution kind of forced itself.”
(In Part #2 of this interview, Polonsky talks about living with imperfections, and some of the deeper elements of Waltz With Bashir.)
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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