Amsterdam, 1942 The Nazis, who have occupied the capital of the Netherlands for a year now, continue their furious hunt for Jews. Somewhere in the center of the city, in a secret apartment, a Jewish family is hiding. Winter night, snow is falling, and the eerie silence of war hovers over the frozen city. In thirteen-year-old Anna’s bedroom, the walls are hung with images of heroic, magical figures, Hollywood actors, or ancient Greek heroes and deities, all spells against fear. Sitting next to her is her father, who tries to comfort her with his words: “My dear Anna, all these characters that you have in your head and that you talk to when you are alone and sad in your room, maybe you could use them to fight your war somehow,” he tells her affectionately, and she falls asleep, immersed in strange fantasies.

She dreams that, while skating carelessly through a vast frozen landscape, she sees a black division approaching in the distance. The soldiers in this terrible parade have nothing human in them: there are no lips, no eyes, no expression or emotion on their faces. These are giant skeletons dressed in black robes, lifeless monsters, ready to sow death. They depict symbols of terror: white swastikas in purple circles. They march menacingly, and behind them stretches a landscape that looks like Hell itself: a huge concentration camp, behind the gates of which a nightmarish red light flickers. And while the little girl is terrified and desperate, she hears the sounds of an unexpected counterattack behind her: an army of ancient gods and Hollywood stars is galloping along the snow-covered slope on myriads of colorful horses, victoriously blowing their trumpets. A little girl rides with Clark Gable on a crimson horse and races to victory. With these masterful dream sequences, two great creative minds from Israel, illustrator David Polonsky and director/writer Ari Folman, completed the famous text Anne Frank, a Jewish-German teenager who between June 1942 and August 1944 kept perhaps the most famous diary ever written. Translated into 70 languages ​​since its first release in 1947, exactly 70 years later in 2017, it is a harrowing 148-page graphic novel translated into 40 languages ​​and already designed and written by an Israeli duo. known to us for his abilities since 2008, when he created the outrageous Waltz with Bashir.

Their new, visually and historiographically stunning take on the famous diary was commissioned by the Anne Frank Foundation, which is based in Basel and owns the rights to the text. And they asked not only in the form of a comic book, but also in the form of an animated film. The goal was to preserve the memory of the victims of the Holocaust for a younger audience who are more fascinated by the image than by the text. Indeed, Folman and Polonsky create such visual and pictorial fun that they give this old, well-known text a modern, fresh, pop dimension.

Polonsky and Folman’s new, visually and historiographically assault look at the famous diary was commissioned by the Anne Frank Foundation.

Their collaboration in the 99-minute film Where’s Anne Frank (in theaters in December 2021 and at the Animasyros festival in September last year), based on the fantasy world of a teenage author, is fantastic. This is not only the unforgettable dream scene with the epic battle between good and evil that we described above. It’s also an endless series of little or big moments of youthful daydreaming that runs uninterrupted throughout the film.

And the point is not only in Folman’s amazing ability to write and direct paintings and stories, but also in the impressive talent of David Polonsky, a Ukrainian-born draftsman, a modest world superstar of the painting, a member of the Potemkin Studio Tel Aviv creative bureau. Meanwhile, Polonsky’s visual references keep winking at us, such as in the adorable scene where Anne Frank is surrounded by her boy fans, all of which are references to the previously famous animated film The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and the work of illustrator Heinz Edelman.

Teenage War

On the occasion of Folman-Polonsky’s film about Anne Frank, we also recall another giant of the image, our “our” Freddy Carabott, that unique Greek-British graphic artist and painter who, together with Michalis and Agni Katsourakis, was a pioneer of modernism. in the field of post-war applied art in Greece. Like Anne Frank, he, too, as a teenager, at the age of seventeen, unwittingly got involved in the tentacles of war and lived his own adventure, which half a century later he turned into 48 shocking canvases, similar to storyboards for a film or a graphic novel. that was never done. However, it was published in 2001 by ELIA under the title 1941-1945. Teenage War. And in the cinematic images of the great artist, as well as in the drawings of Polonsky, fascist soldiers appear gigantic, dehumanized, devoid of everything human. Through the rumpled uniform, it is not a head with human features that appears, but a shiny faceless silver cylinder, and the artist depicted himself (a master of symbolism, like Folman) in the form of a white silhouette.