Film review: Waltz with Bashir

Film review: Waltz with Bashir

Lacking what was probably ample knowledge of a context which pretty much scaffolds this film, (but still drawn by curiosity of what looked like impressive animation), I was a bit apprehensive as to what I'd make of Waltz with Bashir, but, for anyone else unfamiliar with the Lebanese war of 1982; don't be hesitant, it's not as big an impairment as you think...

Directed and written by Ari Folman, whose own memories, or perhaps lack of memories, are what sculpts the films narrative, Waltz with Bashir depicts a riddled soldier, Ari (voiced by the director himself) who, after a nostalgic conversation with an old friend who confides in him about his recurring nightmares in which he is chased by a pack of 26 vicious dogs, believing that it has some connection to his memoirs of an Israeli Army mission he took part in during the war and having long forgotten himself what surrealy seems like a bad dream, attempts to recollect the hazy fragments of his time spent in Palestine during the war. From here-on in the film is a quirky, jigsaw - like sequence of borrowed memories and accounts of others, collected through a series of rendezvous’ with his fellow comrades, that Ari is hoping will help resurface his own. These accounts are real, the only fictitious aspect being the fantastically similar animation of the men who give them.

It's not just the enthrallingl and surreal recollections the interviews with Ari’s associates unfold that leave us transfixed; the incredible graphics alone make Waltz with Bashir undeniably elite amongst all comparative docu-films. Razor sharp illustrations brilliantly personificate everything on screen, and, be it the impeccibly defined physical characteristics of Ari and his comrades, or the surfaces of water or landscapes that crawl in motion, there isn't an animated stone left unturned.

Inconceivably, the subtitled but contextually humorous dialogue only further superiorizes what is already a visually and historically poignant portrait. However, I think that the icing on this cake is the concluding couple of minutes, during which a transition is made and Folman, using archive video footage of the trails of wreckage left in Lebanon post-war, brings his animated masterpiece to life in grim and quite disturbing reality.