Vals Im Bashir

I saw this film at the AFI Film Festival a couple of months ago and it stayed with me since then. This is not your typical war movie, nor is it your typical animated film. I'd say its kind of a cross between Waking Life and Grave of the Fireflies.

The film takes place in the present. The film's director, Ari Folman, comes to the realization that he cannot remember anything from the time he served in the Israeli army during the 1982 Lebanon War. The bulk of the movie are his interviews with his old army friends where he asks them what they remember from that time. Folman tries to see in their memories something in himself that has been missing, deadened, or dulled. Like Waking Life, there is no "plot." The filmmaker prefers a more interview-based film. This is an "idea film," a poetic film, and traditional narrative style takes a back seat.

Like Grave of the Fireflies, the animation in Waltz With Bashir shows the horror of war and its effect on individuals in ways that a live action recreation could never replicate. The film's themes of human memory and its elasticity are served well by this technique. Rather than a soldier escaping death by hiding in the sea, we get the larger-than-life memory of a soldier escaping death that would look too "real" in a live action reenactment.

Let's get one thing straight from the beginning: Waltz With Bashir is an animated documentary. It may sound like a paradox, but hey, when the film played at the Cannes Film Festival (which it left with rave reviews but zero awards) it was inevitably compared to Persepolis, which is an animated autobiography. The comparison was also caused by both movies having open anti-war messages, but they couldn't be more different in concept and execution. They do have one important thing in common, though: they are animated not because it looked good, but because it was the best artistic choice the directors could make.

In the case of Ari Folman, the choice was dictated by the unique angle from which he chose to tell the story: subjectivity. Folman, like many young Israeli men in the '80s, joined the army to fight in Lebanon when he was merely 18 (this was in 1982), thinking he could serve his country in the best way possible. Once the war was over, Folman's new career began, and he is now a successful actor, director and writer (among other things, he worked on the TV show that inspired HBO's In Treatment). However, he still wasn't able to completely get over the war experience, and so he decided to make Waltz With Bashir in order to exorcise his demons, so to speak. In doing so, he delivered one of the strongest, boldest documents about the true nature of conflict.

Folman's introspective journey begins with the lack of memory: apparently, he and many of his fellow soldiers have trouble remembering the exact details of what happened in Lebanon. All they have left is dreams, like the haunting nightmare that opens the movie (26 murderous dogs surrounding the apartment of a former soldier, who believes it to be a subconscious punishment for his killing 26 dogs during a mission) or Folman's eerie flashback of himself and his friends emerging from the water after a massacre he can't (or perhaps doesn't want to) remember. Engaging in a pursuit of the truth, the director locates several people with first-hand recollections of those events, and all these people (minus two) supply their own voices for their animated counterparts.

The stream of personal anecdotes and, as said earlier, dreams, made it impossible for Folman to show real footage of what he was trying to say. After all, how do you show a live-action dream sequence in a documentary without making it look corny? Hence the winning choice of rendering the whole story through animation, with just one exception (the final scene, the one that justifies the film's existence, consists of real filmed material). This gives the picture a feel that is both evocative and down-to-earth, a bizarre but powerful combination that has earned Waltz With Bashir comparisons with the similarly merciless Apocalypse Now. Like few other films about war (Folman has openly stated he despises Hollywood's treatment of the Vietnam conflict, not counting Coppola's masterpiece), this strange, captivating opus depicts it without making it look cool: it's ugly, it's reprehensible, it's the stuff nightmares are made of - not for nothing does it still haunt Folman and his friends.

Journey of self-discovery, cinema as psychoanalysis, a document about the past, a warning for the future: Waltz With Bashir is all those things and much, much more. It's a unique piece of cinema, unmatched in its seamless mixture of raw power and peculiar visual beauty.

Waltz With Bashir is amongst the finest animation films I've seen. It is a very disturbing comment on war and its consequences both on countries and on people of both sides. No doubt this approach has been taken by numerous other film makers; however what sets Waltz With Bashir apart is that it takes a documentary approach and compares Israel's activities in Lebanon with atrocities in the past wars.

Other than documenting events, the film also consists of surreal dream sequences and real life incidents. Thus the film emerges as a unique combination of the real and the unreal. The hand drawn animation also makes it a delight to watch. The colour gave it the right atmosphere of claustrophobia in open spaces and the background score is fabulous.

It is certainly not, as the Director of NZ Film Festival announced before the screening, a 'feel-good film'. It should appeal to people who have an interest in animation, documentaries, war and current affairs. 10 out of 10.

Waltz with Bashir may not deliver everything you expect after seeing the trailers, but it is powerful. Director Ari Folman presents a personal view of historic events in which he took part as a young soldier, but which he cannot remember due to repression. A full-length documentary, filmed with animation over the recorded speech of actual participants in the 1982 Lebannon War, Waltz with Bashir is beautifully done and get its message across clearly.

It's a shame that some of the stronger artistic points in the movie were left undeveloped, such as the imaginary ghost of the soldier's ex-girlfriend following him around (as seen in the trailer). The way comedy and tragedy are interspersed in the latter parts of the film may also seem inappropriate to some viewers. The film presents a highly personal point of view for a documentary, justified partly by staying true to the factual material, and partly by its author having been there on the scene.

Overall, despite its shortcomings, this film makes a strong statement and is definitely worth seeing for its visuals and score.

I think working on this movie for 4 years is long enough. You obviously missed the whole point. The point of the movie is not to point the blame at anyone, it is about showing the reality of war and what the affect it has on Soldiers.

It's not about who won, who was right, or who did what wrong. Its about how people react to it and how it affects the people who are involved in it. Yes it showed only the Israeli side of things, but hey, its because it's on the Soldiers point of view, how they saw it, not how everyone saw it, not how the other soldiers. It shows his point view, and the interviewers points of views. Thats why its like this.

And that is why it makes it so real. It is very well done.