Waltz With Bashir, Rabbit Compete in Cannes

Friday, April 25, 2008
By: Ryan Ball

DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda isn’t the only animated feature to bask in the Cannes Film Festival spotlight next month. Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s much-praised animated documentary Waltz With Bashir is one of the fest’s Official Selections and Anthony Lucas’ My Rabbit Hoppy is competing in the shorts sidebar.

Co-produced by Bridgit Folman Films Gang and ITVS, Waltz with Bashir documents Folman’s journey toward discovering the truth about an Israeli army mission he participated in during the first Lebanon War of the early 1980s that left him with a loss of memory about the events. The long-forgotten images begin to resurface as the director interviews old friends and comrades around the world.

Folman’s previous efforts are the graduate film Comfortably Numb, the 1996 feature Saint Clara, and TV series Saturdays and Holidays, Chapter of the Week and In Therapy (that’s the same Israeli series that served as the model for HBO’s Gabriel Byrne vehicle in the U.S.).

Australian animator Anthony Lucas’ latest short My Rabbit Hoppy will be competing in the shorts category this year. This three-minute offering is about a “Show and Tell” school session that goes horribly wrong. Lucas’ wife Julia and his children Henry and Peggy all helped create this special family venture.

Lucas made headlines with his 2005 The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello which received numerous festival awards and an Oscar nomination for best Animated Short. He told Animation Magazine last year that he is hoping to make two sequels to the original short and present a 75-minute telepic titled The Three Voyages of Jasper Morello under his 3-D Films banner.

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