In the beginning Ari Folman wrote a three-minute “pitch scene” to raise production funds — the air terminal scene as it appears in the film. We had a really pressing timeframe: in a month and a half we had to come up with an approach that was affordable and served the story. Yoni Goodman, the director of animation and myself, we did it in three weeks. It came together, the technique and the aesthetics; it had to be on one hand simple and on the other very detailed. To find the balance between making something stylized, that still has the sense of truthfulness.It’s much easier to make dramatic scenes and compositions — you look at a Tarantino film and you can immediately see the aesthetics of it. What we were trying to do in some places was get as far from that as possible. It’s not trying to impress with draughtsmanship. For Ari’s character here, for example, we were trying to get the right expression, to show his rebellious nature but that he’s still quite compliant and a little bit depressed, all these mixed emotions.
Animating the film, there were two teams. I was responsible for drawing the images, the other animators were manipulating the drawings. Yoni Goodman came up with this technique of using Flash and Photoshop in a very complicated way. The thing is, we had these limitations and were trying to make the best of it, not to compete with these big studios. I personally did over 1700 drawings and I had three other people, Michael Faust, Ya’ara Buchman and Asaf Hanuka, working with me. It took three years but it wasn’t that hard because the people were so delightful.
The other thing that was decided at that early point was the treatment of the background and the world we were trying to create. In this frame you can see that we decided to use photographs inside the drawings. Because the movie deals with memory and the way it works, this uncertain feeling of whether it’s a photograph or a drawing, that came early on.The motif of this specific orange colour kind of developed throughout the film. It started out of something in the script, which is the actual colour of flares and how they light up this very artificial and alarming atmosphere. It’s based on my experience living [in Israel] close to war action, I’ve gotten to see some flares and I know their eerie orange look. The orange then became the motif that runs throughout the film. It’s something burning, a chemical burn, not a warm fire. And it reappears throughout the film until it takes over in the final scenes. But it’s not something for the viewer to decipher, it’s not subliminal, it’s intuitive.
The strong scenes with the dogs and the animals, that’s the easier, fun part. The dog coming at you, whatever you do with it, it’s a strong image. For me, my job, the more interesting thing is bringing it to life with the details, like exactly where in Tel Aviv this is taking place; to come up from the abstract to the specific. The dogs start running in a downtown area with dirty shops and garages and they’re gathering towards a street that is central to a bohemian part of town. The whole dog sequence, the idea is this surreal image of violence invading the most familiar place. Again, I don’t expect someone from London to recognise this street!
This is based on a photograph that they took of the promenade in Tel Aviv. The interesting thing again is the play between this frame and Image 2 — this is Tel Aviv and Image 2 is Beirut. And the fact that they’re so similar and that he’s remembering here in Tel Aviv what happened there. I wasn’t able to go to Beirut because I have an Israeli passport so I’m basing everything on reference but you get the strong sense that the landscapes are very similar because it’s the same weather, same sea. The film’s opening scene with the dogs in this eerie light — it’s not clear if it’s dawn or dusk and the streets are empty, but that’s a hallucination. With the brooding colour here, we’re trying to reinvoke this feeling when it’s really lousy weather. Imagine this at night, not even dogs would come out…
This is not my design, it was drawn by Asaf Hanuka. If you read the script you get the idea that the Isareli army is forcefully intruding into this Beirut but what really makes it interesting for me is the art direction. It immediately gives you the sense of a specific place and a time. The choice of the car, it’s American and those soldiers coming from Israel to Lebanon had this feeling of amazement coming across the prosperity of the country. These guys haven’t seen a videotape of Lebanon, back then Israel had one TV channel. To see an American car would be like an event and if there are loads of them, they’ll go over them with their tanks.
We were trying to convey this sense of absurdity. A lot of things are going wrong, this guy smoking a bong and it’s made from a 7-UP bottle and in the background this is an example of ‘friendly fire’- it’s an Israeli plane bombing an Israeli convoy. Again you’re not necessarily supposed to know that.I drew this in pencil and then scanned the images in and worked over them with Photoshop. It’s kind of therapy, most of the time it’s fun but sometimes it becomes tedious, especially when things don’t work.
That is Ariel Sharon. It’s funny because my first gig as an illustrator was for the Israeli version of ‘Spitting Image’. I used to do all the sculptures and caricatures. I didn’t make Sharon’s puppet but I did someone very similar, another politician. But I had a chance to draw Ariel Sharon as an editorial illustrator many times. He’s kind of chubby and a little bit of a sweet appearance and this again is a contrast between his image at that time as a war hero and his, you might say, criminal disregard for what was going on.This absurdist little joke about him eating five eggs for breakfast, it comes again from the script. The soundtrack is this guy describing the routine at the beach and we didn’t want to illustrate it exactly because it too literal, so we came up with this idea of the visual narrative showing something completely different. The inspiration was these black and white war movies where the general is telephoning the lieutenant and there’s this very heroic chain of command and they’re taking decisions. We were using this stereotype to convey this absurdity – he’s calling him and he’s calling the men and in the end they’re going to catch some kid in the orchard.
This image is one of my favourites, I think. It’s really simple and a lot is going on. It’s symbolic but in the end it’s effective on an emotional level. The motif of the flies just came in as an idea and then it became important because of the same flies hovering over the little girl’s head at the end. The idea of the eye staring back at you, is the conscience or whatever. I had a lot of different size pictures of horses, and it was a combination, but the hard thing technically here was to make the whole frame work without a lot of details, because you have the eye and this is simple but how do you get the feel of the flesh?
This is meant to be like a postcard, like an idealized image of Holland looking at it from Tel Aviv with 35 degrees and 95% humidity! Ari’s friend, this guy Carmi, got away from the war and from the Middle East so Holland has to be this kind of paradise. We even had the tulips! It’s a self-consciously touristy shot. The colours are over-the-top.My artistic inspirations here are by association influenced by the technique I was using at the time for newspaper illustration, because I have to work very fast. I went back to doing that after the film and I’m used to these deadlines where I have to come up with an effective image very fast. In my editorial stuff I do something much more stylized, influenced by my discovery of illustrators who worked for a magazine called Simplissimus, Simplissimus was published in the early part of the 20th century in Germany and all the best artists from Europe came to work there.
This is again one of my favourite scenes because it’s in the middle between a hallucination and trying to be real. It’s the place where they’re dumping their wounded and there’s a feeling of something like an altar, a religious experience, and everything is kind of steeped in this bright light. We tried little touches to bring these characters to life. This guy on the left is clearly religious, we were trying to give him some specific characteristics and life outside of the frame. Again something that I learned on this film was the less you show sometimes, the more effect you get. You just have to hint enough and then the imagination takes over.
This is evoking a very familiar image in Israel. There’s a very famous photograph of a Jewish boy in the ghetto with his hands up, it’s really in the collective subconscious. These are Palestinians and it’s a mirror image, again very bluntly illustrating this feeling of Ari, who, as the son of Holocaust survivors, got involved in this massacre in kind of a reverse role.In the beginning the colour was that bright chemical orange but here it was almost impossible to look at, so we had to tone it down. The colour is deliberately not as energetic, there’s something very slow about the whole thing. And again that’s part of the atrocity; the massacre took three days. They were killing them very slowly. It has an exhausted feel to it, you can’t move fast in this sort of atmosphere.
The shift to live-action at the end of the film is a big issue. For me, I wasn’t sure about it. We had a lot of debates with Ari but he was completely for it from the beginning and now I understand what he meant. It’s true that it’s blunt and it’s true that it breaks this atmosphere but that’s the only simple way to convey the message that something real happened. This whole artistic side of elevating the events, that’s all good. But we can’t forget that something horrendous took place.
