brewmasters
JERRY BECK
bio & contact
view posts by jerry
AMID AMIDI
bio & contact
view posts by amid
Closed Zone by Yoni Goodman
by amid
April 22, 2009 11:19 am


Yoni Goodman, the director of animation for Waltz with Bashir, created this public service announcement for the human rights organization Gisha—Legal Center for Freedom of Movement. It’s a good example of how to use animation to communicate an important political issue with clarity and precision. There’s also a short making-of video in which Goodman talks about the piece, as well as a website for the film at ClosedZone.com.

(Thanks, Mats Grorud)

04/22/09  11:57am

That was fantastic!

04/22/09  1:52pm
Emily says:

The “hand barrier” idea is pretty clever. Reminds me of the inevitable experiments we did with ants as kids. It’s weird to see such serious content contrasted with, I’m not sure what to call it, surf rock?

04/22/09  5:45pm
Isaac says:

Surf rock with middle-eastern influences. A sanitized approach, for sure. Why on Earth did they think a cartoon could reflect the severity of the situation?

04/22/09  8:38pm
Matt Sullivan says:

Nice animation and all, but I’m not sympathetic. Maybe if they’d stop bombing restaurants, hospitals, homes, and innocent people they wouldn’t be looked on with such suspicion. I feel the same way about the southern border. I’d welcome more immigrants if they didn’t bring so much drugs, violence, drug resistant TB, non-assimilation, and rampant overpopulation.

Sorry, but not every person who works to preserve the safety of their people, country, and culture are racists. Sometimes they just do it to maintain prosperity.

04/23/09  9:25am

I think the message is very clear. Doing it in animation like this helps people to view the problem from a different perspective, specially when the audience is predisposed or tired of the usual gruesome live footage exploited by the TV networks.

Thank you for posting this, Amid.

04/23/09  11:51am
Dock Miles says:

The music is by Ori Drumer, an Israeli electronica/industrial musician and multi-media dude, who has expressed sympathy with this animation’s outlook in the past.

http://www.oridrumer.com/

I thought the light, spooky touch very apt. Agony-agony music would have made the spot much more heavy-handed.

04/26/09  5:26pm
ItHastoSaid says:

> Maybe if they’d stop bombing restaurants, hospitals, homes, and innocent people they wouldn’t be looked on with such suspicion.

You clearly aren’t familiar with Middle Eastern conflict history at all. The separation of the Palestinians has nothing to do with suspicion and everything to do with them not being the preferred ethnicity (i.e, since they are not Jews, their right to citizenship is not recognized) of the Israeli state. Even before violence from the Palestinians started, the Israelis were actively expelling Arabs from the state and encamping them in Gaza and the West Bank, which continues to this day.

As for the message of this video, I find that it is futile since it inspires the same kind of ignorant responses as the one I answered to. In the context of this conflict, the restriction of movement of Palestinians is just one small aspect of a state that systematically rejects the rights of an ethnicity to preserve its dominance in the region.

Write a comment.





Comment: