Waltz With Bashir

The movie starts out with one of the characters being pursued by ravaging dogs racing down empty streets and alleys. As the dogs run, mothers cling to their children and people jump out of their way.  This is the recurring dream of a man who has been through war; he is pursued by every dog he shot at the entrances to the Lebanon villages.
“Waltz with Bashir” is a stunning exploration of war, memory, and the disturbingly subjective nature of truth. It is an animated documentary about a man who tries to remember his experiences and what he witnessed during a massacre in the Lebanon war. This man is bothered by the recurring nightmare and tries to figure out what it means. He visits his friend who is a filmmaker to talk to him about it, but the filmmaker himself surprises him by saying that he cannot remember anything from those times.  The filmmaker, Ari, goes on a journey to collect as many memories as possible from the Lebanon war, images and experiences he can’t remember. Ari tries to fill in this black hole in his memory as he tries to remember the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Israeli soldiers allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen to go into two Palestinian refugee camps, where they then slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children.
Even though the movie is in an animated format, we witness a shocking ending of fifty seconds of real pictures and videos of the massacre. The director, Ari Folman said that those fifty seconds of brutal visuals are so touching to people that they seem like fifty minutes.
Folman said this documentary is animated because he couldn’t make it anything else.  He thought making such a controversial topic into an animated film was the best way to depict everything that he experienced and all the events that led up to massacre of so many innocent people. I found the movie interesting and very unique. Because the movie is animated, it enables the director to doing things that a Steven Spielberg film can’t do.  It opens more doors and more opportunities because most of what he remembers is very dream-like and unrealistic. Animation allows Folman to control the image while keeping everything one step away from reality.
This movie is definitely anti-war.  It is made so that it shows some of the downsides of being involved in war and what sometimes happens to innocent civilians. As the main character goes on his journey, we learn interesting things about life, people and war.  We learn that sometimes people ignore those in need of help and protection because they themselves don’t want to get hurt. We also learn that there are people who don’t care what they do/who they kill. At a point in the movie, Ari, and the other soldiers get attacked by the enemy; they start firing back and Ari gets up and goes in the midst of all the fighting and bullets and starts to dance/shoot all around. This part I found a bit odd because when soldiers are being attacked I wouldn’t expect anyone to go in the middle of it with almost no chance of survival. I would expect everyone to lay low and protect themselves.
One of my favorite parts of the movie was when Ari gets back from war and wanders through the streets of the punk Israeli youth.  Their attempts at being “tough” sharply contrast the images of war, bullets, and bloodshed. I think this was intended to show us how war is a part of our life, and yet something very distant to us, something that doesn’t affect us.  The horrors of our nightmares (like the nightmare with which the movie opened up) are nothing compared to the real-life horror and brutality of war.
Overall I think this film was interesting but disquieting. It took a different approach to an autobiographical documentary than other real-life stories of war.  “Waltz with Bashir” is in original form. The use of animation enables the director to explore the imagination of memory, incorporating the dream like montage of the scenes from the Lebanon war from several peoples’ perspectives.  It also gives the director a creative and evocative freedom to take this film in any direction and do with it anything he wants.  This story begs the question of responsibility for this massacre and the involvement of Israel while remaining cautiously close to what was happening.  A must-see for all.