It's fine as long as you draw, but don't film: Waltz with Bashir and the postmodern function animated documentary

“Animated documentary” Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) became Israel’s official entry for consideration for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for which it was eventually nominated. It was the first animated film in history to be so appointed by the Academy. The goal of this paper is to show the ways in which the formal choices made by Folman have perhaps precipitated the creation of a “truer” document. Moreover, I suggest that while Folman’s public statements about the film suggest that his goal was to interrogate the nature of memory via his own reflexive journey, the film simultaneously delivers a convincing critique of the photographic image in the context of 21st-century information production and consumption.