Waltz with Bashir (5/5 Stars) 01/31/09

To watch ‘Waltz with Bashir’ is to witness the rough sketches of a new art form. This film has been nominated for Best Foreign Film for Israel. But it also could have been nominated for Best Documentary or Best Animated Feature. It is about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israeli forces that culminated in a Massacre where thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians were killed, presumably out of revenge for the assassination of a political leader named Bashir. But it is about more than that. It is about that strange thing we know as our memory and a rare phenomenon where our minds block terrible events from our recollections. The people who in this film do not remember the massacre, they have all curiously forgotten how they happened. They know it happened, they know they were there, but the images are scattered and the sounds are muddled. The film starts with a dream sequence in which twenty-six rabid dogs terrorize a city street. This is all one of the men remember about the war. It is a dream he has every night. We hear more eyewitness testimony that is similarly convoluted and probably fictional. There are some amazing stories. The films receives its title from one such story where a Israeli riflemen goes berserk and runs out into open fire firing his weapon randomly into the air. The storyteller describes it as an insane dance, a waltz perhaps. Since the street is plastered with posters of the politician Bashir, the soldier is said to be waltzing with Bashir. Somehow he survived. We get to hear him tell the story. Some of these stories are so strange that the animation doesn’t seem like an artistic indulgence but an absolute necessity. How else would you show hallucinations in a documentary? The animation tells us that what we are seeing is not real; it just describes what the real events felt like. 
There is a strange seduction to this technique. When we see the dead bodies we look on detached to the reality of it. We are induced to view the situations as the hallucinations they are portrayed like. It is only at the end when we are actually shown the briefest of snapshots of dead bodies and hear the actual wails of grief cried that the horror of the reality seeps through to us. I have seen dead bodies in the newspaper before. I have heard the wails of women before. Never did it affect me as it did in this movie. What I viewed as overdramatic before I understand now as a natural reaction to true horror. This movie let me understand that. Surely that is one of noblest thing movies, and art in general, can do.
The animation style of Waltz with Bashir can be compared to another movie that used a similar technique, ‘A Scanner Darkly.’ That movie, directed by Richard Linklater, is noticeably better at the technique called rotoscoping, which I believe is done by shooting real live footage and later animating it. The level of animation in this movie seems amateurish compared to ‘A Scanner Darkly.’ There are several great shots and vistas during scenes of the invasion but the technique suffers when it is only two people talking and the way the lips move belies how people actually look like when they speak. Someone should throw a million dollars into this movie and redo some of those scenes. The story is definitely worth the upgrade.