Waltz with Bashir · reception & legacy

2008 · Ari Folman

How Waltz with Bashir has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A Cannes-competition sensation in 2008 and instant critical darling, it won the Golden Globe only to lose the Foreign Language Oscar to Departures — still cited as one of the category's great upsets. Nearly two decades on it remains the benchmark 'animated documentary,' though it's now debated as much as it's admired.

What's debated

The perennial fight is whether it's a searing act of reckoning or a textbook case of 'shooting and crying' — centring the soldier's trauma while the war's actual victims stay at the margins.

Its footprint

The image of soldiers wading out of the sea under sickly yellow flares became one of the era's most reproduced movie images, and its title sequence of rampaging dogs is a frequent 'greatest opening scenes' pick. Alongside Persepolis, it made serious animation-for-adults a respectable arthouse category.

Where it stands

Canon, not cult: the 'you must have seen this' entry for animated documentary, and a fixture on best-of-the-2000s lists.

★ Did you know? The film is banned in Lebanon, where much of it is set — but it was famously shown anyway at a private, unofficial screening in Beirut in early 2009.

Named by the director

Influences Ari Folman has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Apocalypse Now (1979) — Folman acknowledged Coppola's hallucinatory war epic as a touchstone, and the film openly nods to it in a beachside surfing sequence.