The absurdity of war - An analysis of the depiction of death within the movie Waltz with Bashir

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,0, Stockholm University (JMK), course: Media and Death, language: English, abstract: 1 Introduction ......................................................................... 2 2 Involvement and detachment ........................................................... 4 3 Escapism ............................................................................. 5 4 Symbolic death........................................................................ 6 5 Real death.............................................................................8 Bibliography ---- How authentic can an animation movie be? 'Documenting the undocumentable' (Nichols, 1991, p. 57) is a philosophical as well as a technical challenge and the lack of a 'scientific' basis to memory might make it difficult to categorize WWB as a documentary in the first place altogether (DelGaudio, 1997, p. 190; Pinzon, 2009, p. 10). On the other hand, since their beginning, scholars have already examined it under various viewpoints, mainly dealing with questions of authenticity (e.g. DelGaudio, 1997) and memory (e.g. Landesmann & Bendor, 2011). 3 documentaries have been used to illustrate abstract concepts (DelGaudio, 1997). To mould those concepts into something comprehendible the creators of this movie (Folman, 2008) could not imagine any other way than using the skills of an animation artist to make the audience understand (Sofian, 2005, p. 9)4 Combining intangible memories and dreams with classical journalistic methods like talking heads (Saunders, 2012, p. 13), Ari Folman exploits the boundless opportunities of animation and documentary. As his film is purely created from scratch, he has in addition feature film elements at his hand like sound/music and colour/light to underline the meaning (Folman, 2008). The outstanding use of colours, sound and perspective becomes clear when watching the movie. But the message Ari Folman wants to get across isn't always that self-evident when seeing WWB for the first time. (...)