by Fiona Underhill, Contributor

Flee, an animated documentary, is in theaters December 3. Here, Fiona looks back at two previous animated nonfiction films that are also linked by theme.

This piece previously ran in our Spring “Foreign to Me” issue earlier this year. Purchase here

In the 2000s, two animated films came out one year apart which, coincidentally, shared many features and themes. They are both a blend of documentary, autobiography and war film and are both set in 1980s Middle East. Persepolis begins in Tehran in 1978 and ends in the early-1990s, as the protagonist (who is also the co-writer and co-director) Marjane Satrapi finally leaves for France. Waltz with Bashir starts in 2006, with the Israeli protagonist Ari Folman (who is also the writer-director) flashing back to Beirut in 1982, for the first time in twenty years and trying to piece together memories of a war that has been long-buried in his mind. Perhaps surprisingly, Persepolis is a French film and the spoken language is French (Satrapi attended French schools in Tehran and Vienna before moving to Strasbourg), the spoken language in Waltz with Bashir is Hebrew (with some Arabic).

The animation style in both cases is simplistic, using minimal color, but is also extremely distinctive and innovative in how it conveys life during wartime. Satrapi based Persepolis on her autobiographical graphic novel of the same name and the film very much carries over the visual style of the book. The animators use stark black and white, which is particularly effective (once the Islamic Revolution happens and the veil becomes mandatory) at conveying how homogenous the female populous start to look. 

Waltz with Bashir also mainly uses black (with shades of sepia and gray), but with yellow, orange and brown a lot in the war scenes, and more green and blue in the present-day scenes (when Ari visits his friend in The Netherlands, for example). The animation aids the central theme of memory which runs throughout Folman’s film and the dream sequences which interweave with the stories his friends tell him, as does the woozy Max Richter score. There are gaps in Folman’s memory of the 1982 Lebanon War, and he uses his friends’ recollections to fill these in - as his therapist friend tells him; “memory is dynamic, it’s alive.” From a pack of wild dogs with yellow eyes to a giant woman climbing out of the sea onto a boat, scooping up one of his friends and sailing off with him – it is perhaps the dream (or nightmare?) sequences that linger the longest from Waltz with Bashir. Crucially, they are not Ari’s memories or even his dreams, he experiences everything third-hand, at a distance, but the longer the film goes on, the closer he gets to a truth that he is at the center of.

Both films are highly subjective and are brilliant at conveying these stories through the protagonist’s point-of-view. At the start of Persepolis, we are being given a child’s view of war, with Marjane’s naivete conveyed through her interpretations of the stories she is told by the adults around her. Again, the inventive and playful animation aids this process - her father’s tale of the Shah’s rise to power is rendered in a style that replicates paper puppets and her Uncle Anoosh’s bedtime story is like an ancient shadow play. In Waltz with Bashir, Ari is trying to establish what his role in the war was, specifically during the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, which is the last piece of the puzzle that slots into his memory. Marjane has a highly personal view of war, as any child or teen would, and how it affects her (it makes it difficult for her to access her favorite music, for example). So, the events revolve around her at the center. In Waltz with Bashir, Ari is a vacuum at the center of the narrative and has to gradually narrow down where he was and what he was doing, based on the accounts of his friends. Through their stories, he is trying to find himself.

In Persepolis, Marjane’s family resist the authoritarian regime – they protest and some members, like her favorite Uncle Anoosh, are imprisoned and killed for their beliefs. There is a strong sense of justice running through the film. In Waltz with Bashir, there is no sense of moral pride from Ari and, in fact, it is shame and guilt that has resulted in his amnesia. We are not invited to sympathize or pity him, but we are taken on this journey of discovery and both he and we know that what lies at the end is probably going to be something very bad; “maybe I’ll discover things I don’t want to know about myself.” 

In Persepolis, Marjane’s family are intrinsic to her identity. She escapes to Vienna for her High School years, but drifts through various houses, friends and boyfriends - she is displaced, unmoored. However bad things are in Tehran, it is where her family is and she is adrift without them. In Waltz with Bashir, we know nothing of Ari’s family (or his current life in Israel), it is through his friends (most of whom he hasn’t seen for twenty years) that he retraces his path into the past, back to the nineteen-year-old kid he was. And that kid’s trauma is very much affecting him all these years later. 

These two films intersect in so many ways and were released so close together, it is surprising that they weren’t designed as companion pieces. A third film, which premiered at Sundance in January 2021 is really what triggered my memory of Waltz with Bashir and Persepolis and that is the animated documentary Flee. It is the story of a refugee’s journey from Afghanistan to Scandinavia, as told to the filmmaker by one of his best friends, since he was a teenager. Much like Waltz with Bashir, it is an awakening of long-repressed memories and a reworking of a narrative that is different to the one he has been telling people for years. The trauma of war can have long-lasting effects on the psyche, that it can take decades to wrestle with and finally confront. These beautiful animated films reveal what that process of memory-discovery can look like in visually inventive ways and present a perspective of war that we may not have considered before.