Animated Documentary ‘Waltz With Bashir’ One of Best of 2008

Rating: 5.0/5.0

CHICAGO – “Waltz With Bashir” is a transcendent shattering of what viewers should expect from traditional animation or the standard documentary film. Ari Folman’s dream-like journey into his own memory is a must-see, one of the best films of 2008 and a likely Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film.

It is difficult to capture the experience of “Waltz With Bashir” in words. The film’s writer/director knew that language could not adequately convey what he wanted and that makes it equally hard to explain to a reader the massive power of this experience.

Waltz With Bashir
Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics

“Waltz With Bashir” is a masterful dissection of the way memory works its way from repression back to the conscious. It is not only an emotional, evocative experience in its own right but it is also a jolt to the cinematic system, a movie that defies easy labels or definition.

Waltz With Bashir Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics

Folman’s animated documentary opens with snarling dogs running at the screen to a techno beat. Immediately, it’s clear that this is not your standard doc.

The dogs are a vision of one of Folman’s friends, a fellow soldier in the Israel Defense Forces in 1982 during the Lebanon War. The 26 canines are the animals that Folman’s drinking buddy can never forget shooting during the conflict in Beirut.

The return of the animal dead to another soldier brings a few memories back to the surface for Folman himself. He has a recurring dream in which he and two soldiers are bathing just off the coast. They see flares and enter a desolate city to be met by screaming women. He believes these dreams/memories have something to do with the massacre of Palestinian women and children at Sabra and Shatila but he can’t put the pieces together.

“Waltz With Bashir” is his attempt to do so. The filmmaker conducted interviews with other soldiers in Lebanon, a psychiatrist, and a reporter who was on the scene during the war. Instead of producing a standard documentary, he went home and animated the conversations, inter-cutting relatively standard talking-head footage with dream-like recreations of either what they’re talking about or the visions that have stuck with them for years. Only in the final, devastating scenes does Folman use live-action footage.

Waltz With Bashir Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics

“Waltz With Bashir” never asks us to feel pity for its creator or his involvement, however inadvertent it may have been, in a horrible crime. Even Folman wonders if his time in Lebanon and his proximity to the genocide that occured in the camps is that different from being around when the Nazis commited their crimes in World War II. There is a sense of regret and self-loathing that permeates “Waltz With Bashir,” making it both personally sad and a wider commentary. This is how cultures, not just people, come to terms with their dark pasts - in fragmented bits and pieces, slowly and painfully.

Folman’s film is memory, therapy, commentary, documentary, and more rolled into one. It is about what men are capable of in their darkest times and how easy it can be to turn away in the face of horror and even easier to repress it for decades.

Animation can be more than Disney. Documentaries can be more than what you see on PBS. The limitations of these forms are set only by their filmmakers and their audience. Folman has done his part in surpassing those limitations by making “Waltz With Bashir”. Do your part by seeing it.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com