I’m not quite sure how I stumbled upon Waltz with Bashir, but I’m glad I did. This powerful, animated documentary film about the 1982 Lebanon War to put simply, was superb.
Waltz with Bashir depicts the lost memories of writer and director Ari Folman from the 1982 Lebanon War. The movie starts of with a scene that has fierce looking dogs running through the city, eventually they all stop at their location and gaze up to someone in a window of a building. The dogs in fact are a nightmare of a friend which stem back to his experiences from the Lebanon War.
As Folman is sitting in a bar listening to his friend talk about this nightmare, he is surprised that he cannot recall his own memories and events from that period. He eventually seeks out friends who he served with and other people who were also there in order to understand what really happened and piece together his memory.
Presenting the documentary in an animated form is a unique approach and gives it an entirely different feel to your standard type of documentary films. Along with the soundtrack, I can’t say anything else but how wonderfully crafted it is. The film has a certain perspective to it, it feels more like a collective of short stories from individuals which are finally puzzled together at the end of the film with Folman’s personal journey as the underlining to it all.
At the end of the film, it transitions from animation to real video footage of the aftermath from the Sabra and Shatila massacre. They were very powerful scenes indeed.
Be sure to watch this one, check out the trailer.
This article was posted on August 16, 2009 at 9:41 pm | Filed in movies | why not add a comment?