The movie opens in unforgettable fashion as a pack of vicious dogs stampede through city streets, mostly right at the camera, giving us the feeling of being pursued as prey. The dogs are a nightmarish image, literally. We soon find that writer/director Ari Folman's long time friend is relating this recurring nightmare to him. It is an image that has plagued him since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Folman, on the other hand, has no memories at all of that time. He has apparently repressed them all. But his friend's nightmare triggers a hallucination of his own. He becomes obsessed at remembering and begins tracking down other soldiers to get their recollections in the hopes of recovering his memories.
Folman actually served in that war and really had this experience. He proceeded to interview many other veterans of that war and turned that into a documentary. That served as the basis for Waltz with Bashir. A combination of flash, traditional and 3D animation was used to bring these stories to life. And that is why this isn't quite a documentary. Folman skips the virtually standard talking head documentary format. Animating the stories related by interviewees, he gets an incredible energy and force from these stories than otherwise possible. Wartime documentary film usually falls into two categories. There is the distant wide angle shot of a battle that shows explosions but not many people. Then there is the hyper shaky hand held shot taken from within a battle that often shows little of value despite its proximity to the action. This animated style avoids both of those by giving a smooth vision of events with the sort of precision usually only attainable with a professional film crew working on a fictional movie. Folman gets that at a fraction of the cost by animating.
The style is like watching a comic book come to life. Characters are rendered in simple strong lines but backgrounds can be much more complex and stylized. It suits the dreamlike nature of memory, which is a big theme of the movie.
The approach is the best of both worlds. Folman is researching recent history, telling us a story we probably don't know as well as we think we do. At the same time, he gets to utilize the full power of cinema to tell that story in a way that documentaries rarely can. And Folman has a sucker punch planned. Brilliantly telling a story well constructed and animated, he has the audience mesmerized and fully involved in the horrors of war. And then at the end, when the full grisly story is laid bare, he switches to live action archival footage of the very massacre he just told us about. The effect is devastating. The only sound audible in the theater are strangled gasps.Suddenly you realize that the animation has been protecting us from the horrors of war, rather than making them clear, as previously thought.
The movie is primarily about the slippery nature of memory. But it has plenty to say on war, Israeli leadership, the responsibility of soldiers in wartime and the mental damage done to soldiers. Folman struggles heavily with guilt. The massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps was horrifying and it is no small irony that Israeli troops stood by and allowed a massacre to happen. Folman tries to use the movie to deal with that guilt on a personal level and a national level, giving this movie considerable depth to consider.
It is an extraordinary film that I want to talk endlessly about but also want to avoid talking about in detail so as not to ruin the discovery of it for other people. So perhaps the best thing to say is that this is one of the year's best films, and probably the sort of film that will have a profound impact on other films for years to come.
