Waltz with Bashir

Animation that uses only essential movements, like a form of anime, is used to tell the story of a man in search of his own memory of a war he fought long ago, the 1982 Lebanon war, and the massacre that followed.  Waltz with Bashir is a documentary, but because of its animated presentation, it doesn’t really seem to play like one.  It has the makings of historical fiction, and the line between the two, the history and the fiction, is sometimes so blurred that it becomes negligible and even ceases to exist.  The same can be said of dreams, of our dream life; sometimes we do not realize that an event which occurred in a dream did not actually happen in “real life,” as the saying goes.  But what is real life?  Where is the line drawn between dream and reality, between memory and history, between perception and actuality?

This film explores all of these and more, with a keen eye for discovering and unpacking the lucid and not-so-lucid memories of war.  Is post-traumatic stress disorder a one-size-fits-all, or can it express itself as what Freud might have called denial?  Ari Folman wrote, directed, and essentially stars in this documentary story of a man in search of his own memories.  He can’t seem to remember anything about the war, save for one image, near the time of the massacre.  Throughout the film/story, he interviews several people he was there with, trying to piece together his own memories from theirs.  It begins to fall into place with each successive interview, until a full picture is revealed.  It isn’t the fact of the newfound memory that is the point of the movie, but what it reveals about Ari Folman, about humanity, about memory, about war, and crimes of hatred and inhumane acts of cruely, whether political or otherwise.  The film seems to encompass all of these so easily, so deftly, ostensibly without any trouble at all.  But we know this isn’t true.  We know that the director himself peered into his own psyche and poured out his soul into this film.

The evidence is all over the screen and in the four years it took to create and produce it.  The animation is not typical, but no animation seems typical nowadays, and the type employed here is perfect.  So many chilling moments, crafted to perfection, allow this film and its story to seep into your heart until the end, when you find that you have, in your own way, become Ari as well, seeking to find your own memory of something that you did not experience, forming the story in your own mind.

Waltz with Bashir is at once both a genuinely haunting and beautiful experience, portraying vividly the horrors of war, the ravaging of a people, the intricacies of the human memory, the beauty of the mind, and the search of a man in pursuit of his own past.  If you see a foreign film, make it this one.  If you see a documentary, make it this one.  If you see an animated film, make it this one.  It may be the best of all three categories you see this year.

Rating: 4/4 Stars