Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (Paperback)

~ (Author), David Polonsky (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Waltz With Bashir is a gripping reconstruction of a soldier's experience during Israel's war in Lebanon told in graphic novel form. The result is a probing inquiry into the unreliable quality of memory, and a powerful denunciation of the senselessness of all wars. Profoundly original in form and approach, Waltz with Bashir will take its place as one of the great works of wartime testimony.

Questions for Ari Folman and David Polonksy

Q: How did the book Waltz with Bashir come about?

Ari Folman: The project began as a movie, of course, but the film was more influenced by graphic novels than anything else I've seen. I'm a big fan of graphic novels, and books in general were on my mind throughout the whole process, especially Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Adventures of Wesley Jackson--novels by writers who'd experienced war and then taken a step back to look at it in an ironic, funny way. So the book version always seemed obvious to me and we worked on both simultaneously.

Q: Why illustration? Why tell this story with comics and animation?

Ari Folman: It gave us total freedom to do whatever we liked. We could go from one dimension to another, from real events to the subconscious to dreams to hallucinations. It gave us the liberty to play with vastly different elements in one fluid story line, with no boundaries, and also to make something visually familiar and tired--war scenes--look entirely new.

Q: In terms of the drawings, what was the biggest challenge?

David Polonsky: The illustrations had to have a sense of truthfulness. I couldn't pretend I was showing things exactly as they were, although there had to be the ring of authenticity. But I had no references for a lot of the scenes--like the one where Ari is in the Beirut air terminal, for example. Besides the fact that as an Israeli I can't go to Beirut, the building itself was demolished and rebuilt. So I had no idea what the inside looked like. But there were some references to work with: the scene took place in the 1980's and the building was from the 1930's, and there was Ari and the impression that all this European modernist splendor would have made on him as a young soldier. We collected old posters for Lebanese airline companies, and those details made their way into the panels.

Q: The story is Ari's, and very personal, but it's drawn by David. How did you work together?

Ari Folman: We went through a lengthy process with many conversations about what we were creating. At first, David found it difficult to take something so intimate, something that came from me, and draw it. I think it's pretty rare that an illustrator inhabits someone else's history for three years of his life. It was hard for me, too, because I can't draw, and that limitation meant I really had to put myself in someone else's hands.

David Polonksy: For me, the difficulty was creating the young Ari of the 1980's, someone I didn't know. There were very few photographs of that period. I had to come up with someone who combined rebelliousness with conformity and a certain innocence...Ari didn't accept the rules of his surrounding framework--and he's still like that--but he nevertheless became an army officer. So I gave him a nonstandard haircut and left him unshaven, which is pretty unusual in the army.

Ari Folman: My mother says he didn't make me handsome enough. And in the present-day drawings, David had to change my hair color all the time--it kept getting grayer. Seriously, David's gigantic achievement is to have captured my character at nineteen years old. I felt no connection to that person and only became reacquainted with my younger self through David's portrayal.

Q: You've insisted that Waltz with Bashir is not a political project, but there's no way to read the book or see the movie and avoid making a connection to politics.

Ari Folman: The point is that I didn't set out to make a movie or a book with a political message. It's above all a personal story. But certain things were very important to me that you might call "political." We went to great lengths to avoid conveying anything about war that might be heroic.

David Polonsky: There was another crucial thing for us, which was to avoid showing the soldiers as victims. There's a phrase in Israel about shooting and crying--we shoot and then cry at our misfortune at having to do it. We didn't want any of that here, no self-pity. There's a clear, simple message: war is terrible.

Ari Folman: Listen, Waltz breaks no news in terms of what happened at Sabra and Shatila. Everyone knows the reported facts and I had nothing new to say. I was interested in the ordinary soldier, his point of view, and in the chronology of his understanding of the massacre.

Q: The book and the movie have come out in the United States at a time when the conflict seems more intractable than ever.

Ari Folman: I'm not that pessimistic. Everyone knows that one day there will be a Palestine. In Israel, most people want to be part of the mainstream of ordinary life. They want to earn a good salary, pay less taxes, take a vacation abroad once a year. They don't want to live by the sword. Look at it this way: I made the movie of Waltz with German co-producers. Sixty years ago, my parents' families were slaughtered by Germans. My parents were the only survivors. What's sixty years from the perspective of history? Nothing, but the change is profound. I've been to the Sarajevo film festival: think what was happening there thirteen years ago and now they live in peace. So it can be done.

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--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

While it must have been no easy task for Israeli filmmaker Folman and chief illustrator Polonsky to turn their groundbreaking, Golden Globe–winning 2008 animated documentary into a graphic novel, the transition from film to page is flawless. Folman's story is the account of how he came to grips with the repressed memories of the time he was a soldier in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. As much a study of the fungible nature of memory as a dissection of the ease with which war zones can dehumanize ordinary soldiers, Waltz with Bashir uses the same journalistic technique for self-examination as David Carr did with Night of the Gun. Folman goes from one fellow veteran to the next, trying to get somebody to tell him what he can't remember. Bit by bit the holes are filled in—though never completely; the narrative is never cheapened by turning it into a simple mystery to be solved—as Folman sidles closer to the war's central horror: the massacre of Palestinians by Christian militias at two refugee camps. Utilizing frames that seem cut straight from the film, the book threads together Polonsky's darkly gleaming nightmare drawings into a seamless whole. (Feb.)
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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books (February 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080508892X
• ISBN-13: 978-0805088922
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 6.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,787 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of "Waltz with Bashir", May 25, 2009

By	Edward H. Thomas (Dallas, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a moving story related in the graphic format that is best known in comic books but has recently come into increasing use for serious novels and novelettes. The subject is an important one, based on real events in Lebanon in 1982. The principal protagonist and many of the other charactrs are Israelis who were performing their required military service at a time when Israel invaded Lebanon. Sent into Lebanon with little or no understanding of why, they soon found themselves ordered to shoot blindly in various directions, which at first they did with careless abandon. Gradually, however, they became aware that they were killing unarmed women, children and others. Many of these young Israelis suffered afterward from serious psychological problems. For the lead character, the result was complete loss of memory of what he was doing during that period, and the story is developed around his efforts, many years later, to recover that memory by talking with others who were in Lebanon at that time. That is the unfolding story of this graphic book, and it is not appropriate for me to disclose more of it here, or to say who Bashir is except that Bashir is not the protagonist's name.

This work is powerful. For those not familiar with the events in Lebanon at that time, it is an intense way to gain some understanding of them, perhaps leading to more traditional book reading to get a broader historical picture. For those who do know the history quite well already, it is a vivid reminder of what is behind more recent happenings involving Israel and Lebanon. The story makes no mention of the U.S. role at the time, which was quite significant.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A history lesson on the 1982 Lebanon War, March 15, 2009

By	Sacramento Book Review "SacramentoBookReview.com" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and Ari Folman was a soldier with the Israel Defense Forces. Many years later, Folman is talking with a friend, a fellow soldier who is now having nightmares about the war. Folman realizes that he has very few memories about that time period, and he goes on a mission to discover what he can't remember. Waltz With Bashir, based on an animated movie of the same name, chronicles that mission and all the troubling things the author finds long the way. The book culminates with the recollection of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Although Folman did not actively take part in the killings, he was there, and the aftermath of those days still haunts him.

I have not seen the animated film, but the graphic novel stands alone as a great read. The artwork was stark and brutally clear, although the edges were blurred on some of the scenes as the author remembered them, which was a nice effect. The massacre is obviously not a topic that readily inspires sympathy for the soldiers involved. Folman was simply a soldier carrying out his duties, and I cannot fault him for that. A good take on a dark piece of history.

Reviewed by: Holly Scudero

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully done!, July 10, 2009

By	S. Duke "SMD" (Placerville, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Reading Waltz With Bashir has been an interesting experience. Initially I was under the impression that it was a graphic novel based on a live-action movie, but as I came to learn more of the graphic novel's history I realized that this is a direct film-to-book translation of an animated piece. Each panel is captured from the film and given English dialogue. Despite my general dislike for book adaptations of movies, Waltz With Bashir actually works, because as a graphic novel it is as visually stimulating as a film might be and had an immense impact on me as a reader.

Waltz With Bashir follows a man named Folman, one of the authors, actually, who has begun having strange and terrible dreams related to his involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War. But he can't remember anything from the war beyond vague details and sets out to unravel the pieces to finally achieve some semblance of piece in his sleep. In doing so, however,
he begins to discover things about himself and the war that he would much rather forget.

Waltz With Bashir is clearly an emotional piece, and it successfully strikes home the feeling of regret and terror that comes with war, and especially with particularly bloody ones. While the story never fully completes itself--Folman never recalls his past in its entirety--Waltz With Bashir does give us a detailed glimpse into the world of a modern day soldier in the Middle East.

Particularly touching, for me, were the last few pages of the book, which showed real pictures from the events described by Folman in his memories. These are, to say the least, disturbing precisely because they are real images, not doctored or staged photos--at least, I assume they're not staged. The vast majority of us in the U.S. and other Western countries have not experienced the darker aspects of war, and probably never will. Waltz With Bashir, however, is a graphic novel that wants us to see these things; it wants to pull us out of our comfort zones to relay reality.

Already I am a fan of this piece. While the artwork has a tendency to be a tad simplistic, the merger of real backgrounds with drawn figures is a welcome change from the more typical styles of comic art. And while Waltz With Bashir may not be science fiction or fantasy, I think readers here will enjoy not only the movie, but this graphic novel, because it manages to do what few graphic novels have done successfully: tell a self-contained, deep, and detailed story that is aware of the psychological conditions of its characters. This one is definitely worth picking up!