Waltz With Bashir
Directed by Ari Folman
Reviewed by Rob Fatal
Waltz With Bashir is a film that leaves you feeling as disillusioned, helpless and emotionally exhausted as its narrator/protagonist/director Ari Folam. Actually this is completely untrue, the fragile nature you may feel at the end of this epic war film will leave you feeling about 1/100th of the anguish Folman quests to uncover through out the film; everyday troubles seem to pale in comparison to the director’s quest to retouch upon and remember the horrors he saw during the 1982 Lebanon war as a member of the Israeli army.
Through interviews with his fellow soldiers, Folman begins to piece together the dreamlike memories of his youth. The use of animation in this film is brilliant as it literally illustrates the ways in which humans tend to romanticize memory; even the bad ones. The most brutal memories of war and its subsequent carnage are made to glorious and proud images by the film’s animators and art director, David Polonsky. Perhaps it’s a coping mechanism we all use to make our trauma seem justified; even wanted to some extent. The concept of idealizing our selective memory hints at the depth and meaning of the title Waltz With Bashir: taking a traumatic and horrific incident and not viewing it as reality passed, but as a story which makes up a larger narrative that eventually equates to our life.
And while the film in structure and concept plays out as an all too familiar search-for-self-actualization-piece, the results are powerful as the director/writer/producer combines the grave and relevant animation of Polonsky with powerful interviews from actual Israeli soldiers of the Lebanon war. There are sequences of this film that will haunt you long after the animation stops and the morbid credits roll. In the end, Folman successfully brings to life one of the most horrific, complex, brutal and beautiful portrayals of war ever created.
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