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Visual:		8.0
Audio:		8.0
Acting:		7.0
Writing:		8.0
Score:		9.0

Director(s):	Ari Folman
Writer(s):	Ari Folman
Starring:	Ari Folman
Genre:	Animation • Documentary
Release Date:	January 09, 2009
Rated:

It started with a meeting in a bar.

Ari Folman, the director of Waltz with Bashir, listens to an old friend describe a recurring dream in which 26 vicious dogs chase him down. The dream, as they come to conclude, is a repressed memory from their days as members of the Israeli Army, during the first Lebanon War back in the early 80s. Trying to recall his own participation in the war, Folman finds himself blanking on the experience.

This curiosity to fill the gap in his memory leads to him interviewing his old comrades, each with their own unique perception of the tragic war.

The film tracks Folman as he conducts conversations with fellow soldiers, as well as a psychiatrist and a reporter who was also in Beirut at the time. Rather than molding the material into a fictionalized narrative, Folman keeps this animated film in documentary form, showing him sitting down with his subjects and engaging them in what looks like casual conversations, though they’re anything but.

There’s an advantage in turning the actual testimonies into animated scenes—being able to use camera angles and visual tricks not possible with a “real world” camera—and Folman regularly makes use of it. A conversation inside a car doesn’t have to be shot from the back seat, and an interview on a park bench can end with the camera floating up towards the sky, capturing the entire landscape.

Rather than functioning strictly as one or the other, Waltz with Bashir manages to be exemplary both as a documentary and an animated film. As the former, it’s meticulous in its unraveling of the events, tackling a harrowing subject with a personal touch. As the latter, it’s simply a gorgeous piece of work. The animation itself is slightly crude, echoing the flat movements often found in flash cartoons, but the artistry of the film is unmistakable. Any random frame from this film looks cool enough to be a worthy desktop wallpaper.

With feature documentaries, there are these spaces between the talking heads that have to be filled with more visually arresting stuff—usually either archival footage or dramatic reenactments. When this happens, there is a line, however thin, that designates a disconnect between the leveled interviews and the manufactured parts. Waltz with Bashir circumvents that line by masking the interviews themselves in a fabricated look, resulting in a film more cohesive and organic than most documentaries. When an interview cuts to a flashback of the war, it blends so well that the film envelops you in its story, removed from the idea that it’s a collection of recorded testimonies.

In creating the flashbacks, Folman interprets those testimonies through his own surreal vision, transforming the film into a unique artistic rendering of the war rather than just a revisiting. Referred to in the film's title, one scene depicts a real event where a soldier "dances" with a machine gun amidst heavy enemy fire, as posters of the assassinated Lebanese President-Elect Bashir Gemayel watch on. In Folman’s re-imagining of it, the soldier literally does a waltz. Filling in the empty spaces where the visuals would go is very much a reflection of Folman filling in his own lost memory.

There is another value in it being animated. At one point, Folman’s psychiatrist tells him a story about a photographer who was able to bear with the horrors of war by looking at them through a viewfinder. When the photographer lost his camera abruptly, the war ceased to be mere images and became a reality he couldn’t cope with. Folman recreates this same effect on the audience by switching to real life footage at the very end of the film—after 90 minutes of animation—when showing the horrific aftermath of the Sabra-Shatila massacre, where thousands of Palestinian refugees were lined up and killed by the Lebanese Phalangist militia.

The already disturbing footage suddenly grows exponentially more unpleasant because of this jarring master stroke, ending with a note that very effectively cements the pointlessness of war. Waltz with Bashir is both a memorable piece of investigative journalism and a visionary creative work. It’s a strange hybrid of a film, but all the more powerful because of it.