Waltz With Bashir

Waltz With Bashir:
I saw this movie last night (in the only theatre playing it on the eastern coast, apparently), and I was initially not going to review it. I was only going to write, "Just see it. Please." and leave it at that. Because I truly was speechless and couldn't find the words to describe what I'd seen. But if director Ari Folman could find the images that describe partially what he'd experience in the Lebanon War in the early 1980's, then surely I could at least find some of the words to describe my experience while watching the film.
Animation has matured significantly the past year. With Wall-E and Persepolis (as well as Chicago 10, which I've yet to see) being released last year, animation has matured to the point where they can convey adult situations (not neccesarily sex) and universal themes. With Wall-E, at least, the story was still grounded in a children's tale. With Persepolis, the story is an autobiographical account of living in Iran during the rise of the Ayatollah. The animation is dreamlike in that film, drawn in the same steam-of-consciousness style in which the story is also told.
Waltz With Bashir is more on par with watching a coherent, always-entertaining version of Waking Life in which we actually see the things of which the characters are talking. The film is an autobiography, a documentary, and a therapuetic film. Director Ari Folman, about eight minutes into the film, is asked by one of his friends "Can't a film be therapeutic?" This film attempts to answer that question, and the answer is "Yes...but only to a point."
Folman interviews his friends and fellow compatriots, Ronny Dayag, Dror Harazi, Ori Sivan, Carmi Cna'an, Boaz Rein-Buskila, psychiatrist Dr. Zahava Solomon, and reporter Ron Ben-Yishai. Each of these players is in some way connected to the Lebanon War, and the related Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians by Phalangist Christians.
The film opens with an arresting image of a group of yellow-eyed dogs rampaging through a town, ignoring pedestrians, cars, and everything else. They're vicious, evil-looking, and seem otherwordly. They stop outside a modern apartment building and bark. And bark. And bark. 26 dogs barking. A man appears at the window and stares at them.
We learn that image is a dream by one of Mr. Folman's friends, prompted by an incident that occurred twenty years in the past, when, during a raid, he sniped 26 dogs that were barking when his platoon arrived to pick up suspected terrorists. The dogs were used to warn the suspects so they could, and Mr. Folman's friend, unable to kill people, was instructed to snipe the dogs. The 26 dogs in his dreams are specters of his past, haunting him and, in turn, causing Mr. Folman to begin having flashbacks himself.
Waltz With Bashir is an attempt for Mr. Folman to come to terms with memories he had suppressed for over 20 years. The interviews he conducts with his friends and fellow colleagues illustrate the successes they've each had (one friend teaches karate; another owns 10 acres in Holland, having made a fortune in falafel), but each speaks of their experience with the same detached manner, the mechanical, cold responses. The sense that while having been in the war, they weren't "really" there.
Dr. Solomon, when interviewed, described how a war photographer was abe to keep his distance from the emotional impact of what he was witnessing: he viewed the war through an "inner camera", observing everything through a cold detachment, looking always for "the next best shot". His detachment was shattered, in the first of several powerful recollections, when he went to a stables and saw the dead, dying, and suffering Arabian stallions, once beautiful, immaculately-tended and cared-for animals, crawling and neighing and struggling just to stand up. Emaciated. Dying. Too weak to walk. Able only to lie down and wait for a slow death as the flies ate their eyes. Their fate was sealed simply becase they happened to be in hostile territory. That's what it took to break a cold detachment.
Other interviews take a decidedly surreal turn: one of the interviewers describes his traveling on a "love boat", a chartered yacht meant to disguise the movements of troops across the sea (the yacht turned out to be a normal crew transport). The interviewer, in his mid twenties during this episode, got seasick and fell asleep on deck and dreamt a 20ft. tall woman swam naked to him, lifting him up and carrying him on her belly as she backstroked across the water as he watched his "love boat" and all his friends aboard get firebombed.
Another segment shows Mr. Folman's squad leader, unable to get across a besieged highway, seizing a MAG antipersonnel gun and shooting into buildings, performing a waltz while firing in order to dodge bullets, and leaving unscathed while, at the same time, reporter Ron Ben-Yishai merely walked through the melee without caring, not once getting hurt.
Animation in this film is a pefect way of conveying all of these surreal, deeply subjective memories without once losing any of the impact. The choice of animation styles present (traditional 2-D; rotoscoping, and cel-shading are evident) each create separate emotional cues (rotoscoping is evident with the interviews and a lot of the action scenes; cel-shading for the more surreal segments; 2-D for sequences that are culled from interviews or are recollections that needed to be recreated, etc.). The music, by Max Richter, is modern blend of pop orchestra, with a few reworked pop songs (one song by Cake, "Korea" was reworked into "Beruit") and culled rock songs of the era (P.I.L.'s "This Is Not A Love Song"). While sometimes Mr. Richter's score didn't always mesh well with the film, overall it did, and when it worked it really worked. It is a score worth tracking to listen on its own merits.
However, the animation and the music aren't as important as the story. Or, rather, the stories. Everyone gives their recollection of events leading up to and including the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, internment camps where entire families of Palestinians were killed by Phalangist Christians following the murder of President Bashir. The massacres were carried out with the knowledge of the Israeli Army, and with some of the men in Mr. Folman's platoon as witnesses. Mr. Folman himself witnessed the aftermath of the event, and his friends, in their interviews, recall not knowing exactly what was happening...but knowing that it was wrong.
In the end, Mr. Folman doesn't paint his interviewers as being responsible for the massacre, but yet they realize their complicity in what can be described (and has been described, even by Mr. Folman himsefl) as a genocide. The blame doesn't rest with these men whom have finally faced what they've done, or with the director who has finally come to terms with his own complicity. They are responsible for their actions, each of them, and they realise that. Mr. Folman with this film tries to make sense of everything they recall, literally painting their memories into a story.
But what Mr. Folman can't articulate, what no film or director has yet to fully encapsulate, is the tremendous loss, both mentally and physically, that war forces upon everyone involved. The last interview Mr. Folman films is of a friend who was one of the first to witness the aftermath of the massacre. Walking in through the main gate he noticed a small hand buried in the rubble of a collapsed building. Taking a closer look, he noticed black curly hair atop a tiny face, eyes closed, buried in rubble up to the nose. The face of a little girl with her arms raised in the air. The face of a girl that reminded him of his daughter. Same age. Same black curly hair.

Animation and the imagination can only go so far, Mr. Folman says in the last few minutes of the film. The real world, this one we're caught in, is more fucked up and savage than anything the id can imagine. Nothing, no medium, can ever encapsulate impact of war. Kubrick knew that when he abandoned his Holocaust project. It's too much, too big for film. Mr. Folman comes as close as I can imagine it being. I rarely get moved to tears by a movie.

As we close on an animated visage of 21-year-old Ari Folman staring in shock at what happened in the last few minutes of the film, a sea of crying and wailing mothers and grandmothers rush past him, and the image cuts and turns real. A grainy video image. The real thing. Bodies piled atop one another. Puddles of blood that the living step over to avoid touching. The aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. And as the camera pans to the left, as we continue to see and hear the wailing mothers in the background and the bodies of the dead strewn about, the camera holds on and zooms in on a tiny hand partially buried in the rubble of a collapsed building, and the half-buried face of a little girl with black curly hair.