Waltz with Bashir

The ravaging dogs at the beginning of the film chase you into a story of confusion, a slowly unfurling lick of flame.  It’s a slow paced documentary that keeps your eyeballs nailed to the screen, a rarity.  And with its beautiful animation and mysterious quality Waltz with Bashir is a film that invokes the word awe.  Its stylistic approach to the portrayal of a true story, the story of a man trying to find a past that haunts him with strange dreams gives the film a universal sense.   Beyond that it is a war story, death permeating the screen, bringing you closer to a reality you hope you will never face. 
The documentary’s beautifully drawn animation was the best choice for rendering this story onto the big screen.  It gives the audience a chance to experience the full breadth of the story without being numbed by machine gun CG and endless interviews.  In being a cartoon, the film gets an artistic license to make war a choreographed cacophony.  It allowed waltzes to be played during sniper attacks and battles made to look like ballets.  Instead of the usual laughable reenactments, the story keeps its dignity through a veil of ink.  If the director had shown us all he had gone through with the standard interviews and corny reenactments he would have been nothing but and old war sap trying to bring attention to his problems, his countries buried past.  Since the story is shown through animation, we see the characters, real people, truly frozen in time, and each scene can be thought of as happening for the first time as you watch it.
Through discovering his memories he discovered a whole new way to tell a true tall tale.  The animated documentary, something everyone is calling fresh and exciting is that and something more.  Ari Folman brought a touch of otherliness to his story. A beyond sort of sensation that makes you remember horror is real and there’s somehow beauty in all of it.