Waltz with Bashir
DIR/WRI: Ari Folman • PRO Ari Folman, Serge Lalou, Gerhard Meixner, Yael Nahlieli, Roman Paul • ART DIR: David Polonsky • ED: Feller Nili • CAST: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, Ori Sivan, Zahava Solomon

Waltz with Bashir, an autobiographical animated documentary on the 1982 Lebanon War, explores the complexity of the human psyche and its ability to repress and retrieve distressing memories. The style of this film is what makes it stand apart and lets it land a sucker punch from which it is difficult to recover.

Director Ari Folman does not seek to make a political statement in this documentary. This is an honest examination of how young men dealt with the things they had seen and done in the Lebanon war. Animation brings to life a combination of hallucinations, fragments of memory and talking-head interviews as Folman charts his progress in the quest for answers. As delusions are as important as memory, had it been done in live action these hallucinations would have proved almost impossible to create visually and the film would have lost half its impact.

Following a conversation with an old friend, Folman is forced to acknowledge that he has inadvertently erased whole chunks of memory from his past. These suppressed memories concern events surrounding the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Phalangist Christian militia at a time when he was serving with the Israeli army. On the advice of a psychologist friend, Folman seeks out former comrades and acquaintances of that period, hoping that with their help he may be able to delve into his own subconscious and reconstruct his past.

Not alone is the use of animation important in the film, but also the particular strand of animation. The images are sharp and haunting. Years of exposure to graphic war coverage on TV and in newspapers have allowed us to build up a sort of shield or resistance to these types of distressing pictures. However, the crude splatters and lurid red blood easily pierce through that protection.

Although the animation isn’t hugely sophisticated, the attention to detail of the eyes and mouth in particular is astonishing. Different to other visually similar films such as A Scanner Darkly, the style was not achieved by animating live film cells. Instead, the action and interviews were captured on video and used as a visual aid to create storyboards that were subsequently animated. This allowed for an additional stylistic nuance as even within frames the animation varied, making specific detail stand out. I call recall being very troubled by a child playing in the background during one of Folman’s interviews. Equally the movement of the ocean in those frames where it appears is sickening with its constancy and suffocating weight, representing perhaps the weight of these memories on those that carry them. The ability to create these effects is what makes animation work. It allows Folman to project his feelings and those of his comrades onto the visible canvas and makes everything from the lurid yellow eyes of the dogs in the opening scene to the vivid red bloodbath towards the end real, in as much as memory can ever be real. In fact animation is more true to memory than live action could be. If Folman had used live action to depict the recollections of his comrades then he would be cementing personal memory and, as is discussed in the film itself, memory can be manipulated. Animation effectively illustrates this fluidity, particularly in relation to disturbing events. As one of those interviewed says, it seems like they were on a ‘LSD trip’. They feel detached from the reality, their minds turning the vile images into a psychedelic nightmare in garish colours.

The disturbing fluidity of the majority of the motion underlines the film’s reliance on memory and acknowledges its amazing ability to resurface and reshape itself according to the stimulus. In the frames depicting the time Folman spent on the beach sharing a tent with Frenkel, the speeded-up action is reminiscent of that style used in the Monty Python cartoons. A surreal world is created, but here instead of being funny the images are sickening in the extreme.

The editing of the film is flawless throughout with the jumps from past to present made with ease. Featuring everything from Bach to rock, with some original tracks in between, the soundtrack is seamlessly fitted to the accompanying imagery and the opening scene where the slavering dogs rampage through the streets is accompanied by deafening music that grabs you and pulls you into the nightmare stored in the war veterans’ subconscious.

Folman has created a war film in which there are no winners, with an immediacy of impact that will be difficult to equal. Those who question the decision to use animation for the majority of the film should think about the final footage we are shown. Here, Folman reverts to archived video from the time of the massacres in 1982 and for some reason we can’t shield ourselves from the horrors anymore.

Emer Long
(Read biog here)

Rated TBC (see IFCO website for details)
Waltz with Bashir is released on 21st November 2008
Waltz with Bashir – Official website