Waltz with Bashir
Directed by Ari Folman
- animation
- documentary
- drama
- war
The story
A film director from Israel interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
What it’s like
Flat, rotoscoped animation in muted blues, greys and sickly sea-green, with the figures traced over real footage so they move with an odd, floating weight, and the nights are lit by flares, tracer fire and the washed-out glow of a Beirut skyline. Long, slow-drifting shots hold on faces and empty streets while the score, built on a pulsing synth hum and a few jarring electronic stabs, keeps a low tension running beneath conversations that drift into silence. Its vibe is dreamlike dread and a kind of numb, interrogative grief, better suited to a late, alone viewing than to anything casual. The pacing is deliberate and interior, moving like memory: a man who cannot recall his own war gradually confronts what he did and saw, and the emotional arc is one of slow, painful recognition rather than release. The violence is intermittent but serious: combat sequences, corpses and a final, documentary-style massacre aftermath are shown with restraint yet real horror, and there is nudity and some frank talk of sex and drugs among soldiers. It suits viewers who want a serious, unsettling meditation on war and guilt, and it is not gentle.
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