Review: Waltz With Bashir

Waltz With Bashir is a visually overwhelming, animated documentary. That’s right, the entire film is a doc, only presented in the animated medium, rather than live action. The animation is both the film’s strength and its weakness.

Written and directed by Ari Folman, the film is essentially a therapy session for him, as he tries to remember the massacre (during the 1982 Lebanon war) of Palestinians in Beirut by militant Christian Phalangists, which the Israel Defence Forces (in which Forman served at the time) did nothing to prevent. Unable to remember the event, his mind having apparently blocked out the horror, he sets about contacting his old comrades, and he asks them what they remember. Slowly he pieces it all together in his mind, realisation finally hitting home at the dramatic and chilling conclusion to the film.

Folman’s journey to memory recovery is an unsettling mixture of reality and dream (or nightmare) for both him and the audience, combining both the literary mechanics of Catch 22 with the war is just a bad acid trip attitude of Apocalypse Now. The freedom allowed by opting for animation (most of it by illustrator and artistic director David Polonsky) means that the full extent of the nightmarish memories are realised so vividly that the audience forgets it’s watching an animated film.

In fact the film is insanely brilliant to watch – and therein lies its weakness: the visuals are so strong, the story can’t quite match them. Nevertheless, this is very definitely worth the price of admission - and could be seen as a companion piece to Persepolis.
Score: 7.5