WALTZ WITH BASHIR, the animated documentary that elicited rave reviews at Cannes and Toronto, will not be in the running for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, a victim of the latest Academy rules and deadlines. Ironically, the film will be eligible for Best Animated Feature and also for Best Foreign Language Film (Isreal chose the film last week as its official selection).
According to a publicist for the film: Sony Pictures Classics, BASHIR's distributor, had initially intended on fulfilling the Academy's latest requirement that films have one-week qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles. However, the distributor was told by NY Film Festival reps that such a run - even an underground, unpublicized run, prior to the NYFF, would knock it out of the prestigious fall fest. So, SPC decided to move forward with the NYFF and forgo pursuit of the documentary Oscar.
Writing about the film at Cannes, NY Times' Manohla Dargis described BASHIR as a powerhouse:
"(Director Ari Folman) plunges us right into his nightmare with a harrowing vision of low-down and dark dogs running at the camera, teeth bared and eyes glowing bilious orange-yellow. The dogs run and they run, gathering in number as they cut a swath through everything and everyone — men, women, children — in their path...
Brought to vital, plausible life in a combination of Flash, classic and 3-D animation, the characters look as if they stepped right out of a graphic novel. Their faces and bodies, for instance, are outlined in black, but their faces are so ductile and expressive that I was surprised that they hadn’t been rotoscoped (the animation technique in which live-action movement is traced over). The fluidity of the figures accentuates the air of surreality — one soldier compares war to an acid trip — which deepens as the story reaches its terrible end. That finale, which finds the animation violently giving way to live-action documentary footage, is stunning, at once a furious act of conscience and a lament."
SPC, it should be noted, has not had terrific luck in the Doc Oscar race over the past several years. They last had a film make the shortlist in 2005 (THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON) and their last nominee in the category was 2003's THE FOG OF WAR. This despite SPC being consistently one of the top distributors of nonfiction titles (last year's omission of MY KID COULD PAINT THAT was a particular surprise) and despite success in other categories, including an Animated Feature nod for last year's PERSEPOLIS. (Update: Variety's Anne Thompson has more on BASHIR and SPC's other entries in the foreign language field.)
The absence of WALTZ WITH BASHIR adds to the growing list of this year's high profile, cinematic nonfiction titles that have been, for one reason or another, eliminated from Oscar contention. Other films not eligible this year include YOUNG@HEART (foreign TV broadcast), UP THE YANGTZE (foreign TV broadcast) and SURFWISE (pay-TV broadcast). Each of those films is amongst the 20 top box office titles of 2008, thus far. (It should be noted, however, that each of these films is eligible for the Cinema Eye Honors).
WALTZ WITH BASHIR screens this Wednesday and Thursday at Ziegfeld in NYC. It is scheduled to open in New York and Los Angeles on December 26.
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