In his piece Screen Memory in Waltz With Bashir, featured in Film Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Spring 2010), Garrett Stewart breaks down the stylistic decisions that director Ari Folman and his team made when creating Waltz With Bashir, and the impact these decisions had on the narrative. Stewart first pays reference to the fact that the film was entirely shot with live action, in a studio, and then redrawn during the animation’s production stage. Contrary to what the viewer might initially assume, Waltz is not rotoscoped (an animation technique where motion picture footage is traced over, frame by frame). Instead, the original live action footage was used as visual reference to inform the composition and pacing of the final animation. Folman himself says that this was an intentional stylistic decision, in order to allow for more creative freedom to control the emotional fluency and impact of the characters. In an interview with Studio Daily, Folman explains,

“I respect rotoscoping and I even like Waking Life, unlike my animators,” he says. “But, for me, rotoscoping has a big problem in conveying emotions. You see the technique, you see the drawings, and that takes your focus. If this film had been rotoscoped, it would have been hard for the audience to get emotional with the characters.”

Stewart makes the point that much like the film’s focus on suppressed, warped, and second-hand memory (even when concerning one’s own suppressed memories), Waltz’s production technique echoes this; second hand animations of previously live, tangible footage; exaggerated and warped recollections of what was once real:

“In line with the developing ironies of psychic artifice in the
film, these effects aren’t just associated with surrogate visual
memories; they are surrogate cinema.” Stewart