Review – Waltz With Bashir

By Tessa Moran

I admittedly ground my teeth upon first hearing of “Waltz With Bashir”, the anamolous animated documentary feature now in theatres.   I thought it sneaky for director Ari Folman to categorize his film as documentary via the auspices of animation.  In truth, I was miffed that I hadn’t thought of the brilliant strategy myself.

Animation is particulary fitting for this film: a haunting tale of fractured memory.  It is comprised of a series of interviews that Folman conducts with his Israeli comrades in an effort to recover his apparent lost memory of the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila. Their interviews – redrawn in animation – are intercut with scenes of their tragic memory: one in which IDF soldiers punch bullets through the body of a young boy armed with an RPG.  Another in which a soldier’s steep fear causes him to run away as his unit is gunned down; he continues to live with the guilt that he could of done more.

In some ways, this patchwork story is an admission of culpability.  Afterall, Israel was sharply criticized for not preventing the slaughter of Arab Palestinians by their Christian couterparts.  The film goes so far as to draw a notable, yet careful, comparison to the Holocaust, where too many a turned eye permitted genocide.

Folman isn’t preachy; he’s apt to recognize the “fog of war,” best defined by shamed Vietnam commander Robert MacNamara in Erroll Morris’ Oscar winning doc.   At the tender age of 19, these men are drawn into a war they cannot comprehend, and one they can barely calculate in their wiser years.  Their memories are spotted by the crafty tricks the mind plays to save the soul and twisted by their awkward reentry into the world of the living. Via animation, we are able to visually understand Folman’s feeling of being caught in time upon returning from the war:  his young uniformed figure set in slow-motion as the world speeds past him, pumped by the sound of techno music.

Throughout the film, animation is cleverly used to blend reality, memory and dream so that each are indistinguishable from one another.  It is an antidote to the documentary “purist” who perhaps naiively sees film as capable of truly achieving authenticity.  Reality is a projection – true or false – of both the filmmaker and storyteller.

Animation in this film eases scenes that would have otherwise been too violent to watch, yet at the same time is unsettling to minds accustomed to it as a form for children’s stories.  The drawings are crisp and near-real looking.  But the heavy notion that this story is a true one, and one that involves a massive loss of life, becomes clear in the very last seconds of the film when animation turns to actual footage of the dead.

“Waltz With Bashir” is more than worthy of a go-see, not only because of its foray into an unchartered form of documentary storytelling, but also because of its sophisticated discussion of war and its lasting impact.