Review: Waltz With Bashir

Waltz With Bashir (2008)
starring: Animated
dir. Ari Foleman

This is a really good movie that is just a pinch away from being a great movie. The pinch needed was a little bit of context. I'm not young, but I'm not a dinosaur either. I was 10 years old when the war in Lebanon was taking place. I was more interested in playing Star Wars, very few discussions about war atrocities on the playground unless you were a massacred jawa. So it took some time for me to understand the situation that was being presented to me in Waltz With Bashir. This was about more than a war is hell scenario. This was a story about guilt so deep that it decides to hide and suppress the memories that go along with it.

The film ceters around filmmaker Ari Foleman and his time spent in the Israeli Army during the war in Lebanon. He has forgotten all of his memories about the war, more specifically the Sabra and Shatila massacre, except for a single image which may or may not be a real memory. He follows that image and visits old friends who were in the war to solve this mystery of what happened there. It's the human story that kept me engaged and I was curious as to what the truth behind the memory loss would be. Oh and the whole thing is delivered as an animated story.

The animation works, for the most part. I thought the visual execution of war scenes and emotional space that the characters inhabit were engrossing and made the most of the decision to use animation. It was the smaller scenes of characters sitting across from each other talking that gave me pause. I'd notice movements that brought me out of it. Heads nodding or wrists bobbing like I was watching paper dolls and not human beings. A bit of an issue when these scenes are the key in building a struggle taking place inside our protagonist.

In the end it is a very satisfying film that brings up an interesting point of view about how we as individuals deal with guilt through memory. For a while I had pondered that trying to piece the history together might have something to do with the fractured memory of the narrator. Then I decided that it was about personal memories and not historical, so I tossed it out the window. In Foleman's native Israel, these are events that are part of their history, so the set up is well known. For a person totally lacking in the knowledge of this history, I needed a little set up. It is totally a fault of mine and nt the films, but unlike my recent viewing of Gomorra (2008), this time lack of knowledge did interfere with my viewing.

7.5 out of 10

(it would have been 8.5 if I wasn't such a dolt with world history)