In terms of animated style and finesse, Waltz With Bashir takes a very different approach to other, more cartoon-oriented studios such as Disney. In Waltz you don’t find exaggerated cute facial features or slapstick body movements, such as in the Frozen sequence of Olaf and Sven. Instead in Waltz you find a more restrained and economic approach to animation. The film itself was not produced with the same kind of budget as Disney, and so stylistic limitations had to be set. From my observations when watching Waltz, it appears to be using a mixture of frame-by-frame animation for intricate, complex movements and effects, and keyframed skeletons for more simple movements.

In the opening sequences, the dogs appear to also be a mixture of keyframed skeletons, and hand drawn details.

When the first dog appears from the alleyway, it comes out at such a pace that it overshoots the path. This is of course what dogs do when they run at full pace, and in Waltz this has been exaggerated ever so slightly so as to emphasize the pace and violence of the dog.

I think this opening shot is also an excellent example of staging. We are surprised by the dog’s sudden entrance into the quiet street, and the camera is placed directly in front of the dog, so that we get a full sense of the dog’s rabid face. This also delivers a strong sense of danger as it appears that we ourselves are being chased by the dog.

When the car is forced to stop here, there is a simple but effective animation of the car’s front dipping and its rear rising, to give the impression of the sudden force of its loss of momentum. This animation takes the principles of secondary action and overlapping action into account – the 2d drawing is treated as though it is on a 3d plane, with a front and a back that react differently to the sudden braking.