In 2008, Waltz with Bashir was nominated for best Foreign Language film. While receiving praise, “Waltz with Bashir” has also sparked several debates about whether animated documentaries can be called documentaries.
In my opinion, documentary is to record reality, with reality as the core. The controversy about Waltz with Bashir focuses on “the legitimacy of the existence of animated documentaries”, but in fact, it focuses on “whether the form of animation can represent reality”. First of all, for the definition of documentary, I agree with the view of the Soviet film “Movie eyes send” to some extent. Soviet documentary film director Jiga Vertov believed that the film camera is just like the eyes of people, or even better than the eyes of people. He advocated that the filmmakers hold the camera to “capture life by surprise”, and opposed artificial acting and even general acting films. They truly record reality and guide the audience to reach a clear ideological conclusion, which restores the purpose of documentary “recording reality” to the greatest extent. Secondly, the subjective and objective problem is also one of my doubts about animated documentaries. In the documentary, the director may use montage to guide the audience to understand subjectively to a certain extent. But in animation, the director can make more subjective decisions about shooting and montage. Finally, going back to the film, there are many fictional animated images that represent the memories of those who were there. Memory itself carries some subjective, fictitious falsification and so on.
To sum up, I don’t think animated documentaries can be considered documentaries. In fact, “using animation technology in a documentary” is a very broad way of expression, because animation technology provides a good way to reproduce the irreversibility of the scene. A small amount of technology assisted implementation, will not change the nature of the documentary film. And animated documentary lacks real shooting.
