David Polonsky was born in Kiev in 1973 and immigrated to Israel when he was eight years old. After his studies at Bezalel, he began his career as an illustrator for the press and television. He burst into public consciousness with his work on the film Waltz with Bashir (2008, director: Ari Pullman), which was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category. Since then he has created countless projects in versatile mediums.
As one of the most important illustrators working in Israel today, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has chosen to present Polonsky, the first comprehensive solo exhibition, showing hundreds of images of preparatory drawings, paintings, photographs, dolls, film scenes and archival materials that he used in the preparation of projects, including the films Waltz with Bashir , the conference of the futurists and the legend of destruction, the books Anne Frank: The Graphic Diary, The Sixteenth Lamb, A Flower I Gave to a Light, On a Leaf and on an Oak Tree and many others.
Waltz with Bashir
The adult animated feature film directed by Ari Pullman, won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008 and was nominated for an Oscar. This is the first animated documentary film to receive worldwide distribution, dealing with Pullman’s journey to recall the events of the First Lebanon War (1982), and especially the question of where he was when the massacre in Sabra and Shatila took place.
The film opens in the present, through interviews with brothers in arms, journalists who covered the war and professionals dealing with post-trauma, it moves back in time and presents the fears and madness of the war, and the young soldiers’ dealings with the horrors and death. While documentaries try to stick to the facts to recreate the event, Pullman is interested in the personal experience and focuses on post-trauma and the memory gaps between past and present with the medium of animation.
David Polonsky, the main illustrator and artistic designer, uses the qualities of the medium to bridge between what can be represented and what escapes it, be it the deceptive past or the appearance of Lebanon’s landscapes during the war. The mixing of photography and painting and the intense and symbolic colors give depth and serve the emotional volume of the film: they highlight the distinction between representation and reality and create a distance that allows dealing with the difficult scenes. The colors are intensified and changed throughout the film in accordance with the different subjectivity of each of the interviewees, and to add and refine the stylistic distinction between the remembered consciousnesses – some of the scenes were drawn by additional illustrators. In some of the illustrations, except in the case of interviewees who asked not to be revealed, the illustrators relied on facial photographs of the speakers themselves.
Anne Frank: The Graphic Diary
Wrote and edited: Ari Pullman Air: David Polonsky. Coloring: Hila Noam. Kinneret Publishing House, Zamora-Beitan, Dvir, 2017
“In the analogy of working on a film, Ari was the director, I was the actors, the set, the dresser and the make-up artist and Anna was the screenwriter,” Polonsky explains. The Anne Frank Foundation, which wanted to make the diary and the subject of the Holocaust accessible to young people today, initiated the creation of the graphic diary and the animated film based on the diary. In 2012, the foundation approached the creators Ari Pullman and David Polonsky, and made available to them unlimited access to its archive. The graphic diary was published in 2017, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the diary. The graphic novel genre, which was established around the world in the 80s, differs from comics in its length and is more capable of dealing with complex issues.
To process the diary into a graphic novel, Pullman and Polonsky chose to shorten and edit it and in the process give room for illustrations, which would complete the missing words. Many of the diary sections have been left as written and are presented in a square frame. The dialogues between the characters were added by Pullman, and are given in rounded text bubbles. Early graphic novels dealing with the Holocaust (the best known of which is Art Spiegelman’s Maus from 1980) were often illustrated in black and white – but Pullman and Polonsky chose color to create an identification with today’s youth. Polonsky’s illustration is based on European design and comics magazines from the first half of the 20th century, thinking about adapting the style to the period of occurrence. On this basis, it is wonderful to capture the murmurs of Anna’s heart and the voyages of imagination, the girl’s sarcastic humor combined with anxieties and fears.
The Futurists’ Conference
France-Israel-Belgium-Poland-Luxembourg-Germany, 2013. Director: Ari Polman. Chief designer and illustrator: David Polonsky
Polanski explains, “I tried to create a world whose connotations lead in all kinds of distant directions. On the one hand, I saw that Hieronymus Bush’s drawings connect well with the animation from the 1930s that we decided to rely on, and on the other hand, we also incorporated a new pop style, because some of the characters depicted in the film – like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Che Guevara and Yoko Ono – they are contemporary.”
The Futurists’ Conferenceloosely based on a science fiction book of the same name by Stanislav Lem (Lem), is a full-length motion picture, the first half of which is filmed (live-action) and the second half is animated.
The film tells the story of an actress named Robin Wright (played by the actress Robin Wright), who accepts the offer of Hollywood studios to scan her body and voice and use her image without restriction for twenty years. Twenty years later, she is invited by the studios to the “Conference of the Futurists”, which takes place in the animation city Abraham. There, in the animation zone, a hallucinogenic drug allows those present to change their animated body to any body and thing they want. The plot moves in abstract and non-linear realms, which the animation allows for their expression.
Like Waltz with Bashir, here too the animation tool illustrates fluidity of memory and consciousness, reality and discussion. In his search for a style that would distinguish the animation in this film, which deals with the power of the film industry, Polonsky created a tribute to the style associated with the Fleischer studios, which operated at the same time as the Disney studios in the 1930s and 1940s. Fleischer’s style, the film is built from two-dimensional animation drawn (albeit on a computer) frame by frame, 24 frames per second. For this, a huge number of drawings were required, drawn by about 250 animators from six countries.
At the entrance to the animation district, the monotonous desert turns into a colorful and psychedelic water world. The Abraham Hotel in Las Vegas is designed as a cross between the Flatiron Building in New York City and the Titanic, and is surrounded by other ship buildings. The choice of the early animation version also reflects the design of the hotel in the Art Deco style that prevailed in the 1930s. To strengthen the hallucinatory dimension in the scene taking place in New York, Polonsky drew fantastical elements from Hieronymus Bush’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, combined with plant motifs in the style of art nouveau interwoven with the buildings of skyscrapers and the Tempelhof airport in Berlin. The grotesque souls and hybrids that populate this drug garden are mostly based on familiar characters from popular celebrity culture, promoted by Hollywood as opium for the masses.
love potion
One of the stories in the file How to Love
by David Polonsky. Illustrator: David Polonsky. Moden Publishing, 2009
“The unifying factor in this book is impersonation and deception. There is evasion in trying to sort love into types, so I chose the most magnificent evasive or liar, which is Baron Munchausen, and I invented new stories for him. In fact, I predicted an impostor,” Polonsky confesses.
A series of illustrations for the book how to love, which brings together six comic stories on the theme of love by “Actos Tragicus” – an Israeli comics group, founded in 1995 by Ruto Moden and Yrami Pincus and significantly promoted the field of illustration and comics in Israel. As a guest in two of the group’s books, David Polonsky illustrated the story “Love Potion” – unusually he even wrote it, as is customary in the comic genre.
“Love Potion” is a frame story: an old baron tells his mistress love stories from his travels around the world, reminiscent of the plots of Baron Munchausen and moving between fantasy, fairy tale and folk tales seasoned with humor. The ornate and highly detailed illustration style Av Polonsky drew from baroque engravings and illustrations for European legends from the 18th century, when Rudolf Erich Raspeh also wrote The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen. During this period, mysticism and science were used in a mixture, and the illustrations show a pseudo-scientific approach to cartographic, Bhutanese and zoological illustrations.
tinkertank
By: Nurit Zarhi. Illustrator: David Polonsky. Crown Publishing, 2012
Polonsky says “When I started working on the book I was in the midst of falling in love with 1930s animation. I felt that this style was appropriate to express the tension that exists in the story between the sweetness of the fairy world and the drama of shaping the heroine’s identity contrary to the dictates of convention.”
Tinkertank is a fairy who fails to fit into the light and pink world of fairies. She is thrown to the ground by the fairy queen, and tries to find her place in the world. When describing Tinkertank’s abnormality in the world of fairies, David Polonsky turned to the subversive early animation of Max Fleischer, who in designing the character of Betty Boop introduced a stylistic revolution in the field. Compared to the thinness of the blonde “Barbie” of the other fairies, Tinkertank is designed as a child’s version of Betty Boop: short, dark haired, with big eyes wearing an oversized shirt, striped socks and heavy army boots.
Tinkertank is the opposite of the fairy or Disney princess character that has been fixed in the visual consciousness. The angles of view in the fantasy world of Tinkertank are cinematic and dramatic, as are the varying sizes of the characters. Miss O’Brien’s raven, which lands on Tinkertank’s shoulders at the beginning of the book, later grows larger and allows Tinkertank to ride her. A flight of the two over cities and villages ends with a spiral spread, illustrating the dimensions of time and distance and the heroine’s view of the world of humans.
A legend of destruction
Israel 2021. Director: Gidi Dr. Paintings: David Polonsky and Michael Faust
On the legend of destruction, Polonsky explains that “the production value comes from the complexity of the painting, from its richness, from the fact that you can look at it for a few seconds. And it took from the history of art, from Baroque Renaissance painting, historical giant paintings that you can stand in front of for twenty minutes and observe.”.
A legend of destruction is a historical epic based on the story of the rebellion against the Romans and the civil war that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 66 AD, as it is discussed in the Babylonian Talmud. The paintings that make it up, about 1,500 in number, are not animated to create movement. These are indeed static paintings drawn on a computer, but they look as oil or pastel paintings, and the camera lingering over each painting allows observation of the composition and details before moving on to the next painting. In some cases, the camera moves over the paintings themselves.
The paintings were created by David Polonsky and Michael Faust for about seven years. Each painting tries to historically recreate the daily life of the time of the rebellion – the streets of Jerusalem and its buildings, the setting of the temple, the dress of the queen and the common people, the faces of the characters. To be as precise as possible, and in the absence of primary sources of visual representation, the illustrators went beyond the information provided in the scriptures to secondary visual sources, such as the model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple period displayed in the Israel Museum, so that the paintings themselves are accepted as a representation of collective historical memory. To emphasize the historical pathos, the paintings were based on different styles of the historical painting genre, such as the paintings of Caravaggio or the large-scale orientalist paintings of Delacroix, as well as Hollywood epics such as those of the director Cecil B. de Mille.
moonless night
By: Shira Gefen and Etgar Keret. Illustrator: David Polonsky. Am Oved publishing house, 2006
It is interesting what Polonsky says about the work on the book “I wanted to bring together the style of the Ukrainian illustrator Giorgi Nerbot with the landscapes of Haifa, plus Japanese spices and touches of American animation from the 1930s”.
The girl Zohar discovers that the moon has disappeared in the sky, and sets out on a journey to find it and return it to its place. The search for light, as a central motif in the book, is emphasized in David Polonsky’s illustrations and the silver color he chose for the pages. The presence of Zohar, whose name also embodies the light, illuminates every page with her bright mane of curls, and on the journey she meets other characters that represent manifestations of light: a pampered cat stretching in the shape of the moon, a strict policeman illuminating the world with a flashlight, or a man in a cabin whose bald head shines. The silvery color of the moonlight, like a light shining through the darkness, serves as a background for the illustrations and fills the gaps between text and illustration to create a magical odyssey.
The illustrations move between the horror of the night and its beauty and present cinematic angles that are not common in children’s books. Inspired by the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, nature and the still life come to life and reality mixes with fantasy.
Since the story refers to Peña Bergstein’s classic book, Vahi Arab (1949), which centers on a girl’s night journey, Polonsky also referred to this book in his illustrations. At Vahi Arab Iyer Haim Hauzman (1921-2006), who came to Israel from Germany before World War II and was exposed as a child to the design expression that was customary in those years. When the book came out, there were critics who claimed that the non-Israeli appearance of his illustrations, especially in the figure of the blonde girl and her European clothing, was alien to the pioneering spirit. Polonsky, on the other hand, follows Hausman and creates a new illustrative lineage for Israeli children’s literature.
On a leaf and an oak
By: Shira Gefen. Illustrator: David Polonsky. Am Oved publishing house, 2002
The first children’s book illustrated by David Polonsky, presents the relationship between an oak tree and a tree, from the girl’s point of view. “I was drawn to combine something that is not from here with something that represents the landscapes that the children in Israel know. A kind of connection was born between the landscape of the rented apartment I lived in in Tel Aviv and the style that I drew from the history of art, mixing between an elaborate painting and the Tel Aviv landscape.”
The illustration was done in acrylic colors on wooden boards he found on the street, where the common substrate of the wood’s textures and colors connects the illustrations and gives them an intimate warmth. The stylistic strangeness of the illustrations, which correspond to an Italian painting from the early Renaissance, is conditioned by a combination with typical scenes from the streets of Tel Aviv. The familiar Tel Aviv appearance creates a closeness and connection to the scene – the typical Tel Aviv garden, views of rooftops with solar boilers, or the floor tiles in Alona’s apartment.
The book is structured as a “picturebook”, which reverses the usual hierarchy between text and illustration. The illustration takes a central place in it, when in the experience of visual browsing new layers of meaning are created between the word and the image and a call to observation.
Illustrations for the press
For more than 15 years, Polonsky has been creating numerous illustrations for the daily press, weekend supplements and magazines. Due to the constraints of the current affairs and the hectic schedules of the printing, a unique type was created for the field adapted to fast execution.
To attract the attention of the pagers, the illustrations are often characterized by colorful dramatization, heavy shadows and extreme caricature. The illustration not only attracts the reader’s attention, but also communicates the article through the visual means of the image and colors it with an additional interpretive tone. In his ability to convey abstract and complex messages, he often manages to show what is hidden in plain sight.
In the case of a profile article, the illustration deviates from routine public relations photographs in creating a closeness to the character, which is sometimes depicted in a humorous tone. An unusual angle of view or unusual background details present the character in a unique way. One can notice the style of the illustration changing according to the different subjects, while refining the interpretation of the contents The article and extracts of the bottom line.
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Curator: Tal Lanir
23.9.22-18.2.23