Saturday, February 26, 2011
Waltz with Bashir
Waltz with Bashir is an interesting and powerful movie that uses a firsthand account of the 1982 Lebanon War as the audio and animated as visuals. It works well to tell an honest story with memories brought to life by animation. Animation is appropriate here because it gives the dream-like quality associated with memory. Memories, dreams, and animation all make forays into the surreal. The violence is not over-the-top, as it could have been, but rather personal to the main character.
Waltz with Bashir is a good model for how I would like to see a Blood Meridian movie. It should be slightly more unrealistic than this movie but with a heavy emphasis on the personal story, the feeling that overarching events are inherently related by an unseen force.
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I believe the scene at 1:25 in the trailer, when the soldier appears to be waltzing as he fires in the air, could only be done in such an animated style. This scene (like many others in the movie) appears unreal; it serves to show how a young mind interprets a frightening moment and how memory alters time and space. We see this particularly with the slowing down and speeding up of “time” in the more symbolic events of the movie.
ReplyDeleteI agree that using a similar animation style would be useful in a Blood Meridian movie particularly in the more absurd scenes of violence or fever dream. Imagine the animated judge walking down the wasteland hills, naked, with his rotten skin parasol and imbecile on a leash to the same soft piano tune. What kind of music do you think would work best in a film version of McCarthy’s novel?
Check it out: NPR story about a guy named Ben Nichols who wrote a bunch of music for Blood Meridian.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99347082
I remember writing something about how the unique visual style of animation would indeed lend itself well to the production of a blood meridian movie. I'd argue that animation has the ability to grant the director or the cinematographer more creative latitude over the types of shots they're able to put on the screen. Divorced from the limitations of actually using cameras to capture action, animation provides the chance for the viewer to be immersed in a more dream-like world where lots of the surreal images in blood meridian may be effectively depicted without putting the viewer off through either the gore of the scene of the sheer incredulity of it.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this animation would be a good way to convey the absurdity of some of the scenes in blood meridian. This or something like sin city would be an effective way to showcase the violence in the book since a live action movie might seem a little too grotesque if everything is shown as the book tells it.
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