I’ve never before seen a movie like Waltz with Bashir. It’s an animated documentary that Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman created about his experiences in the 1982 Lebanon War, and was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar. The movie utilizes a unique animated style that fits perfectly with its subject matter of memories and nightmares.
The movie opens in a squalid urban street, black and white under an oppressive, garish orange sky. Ominous electronic music reverberates throughout the theater as a pack of slavering wild dogs rush through the alleyways toward the screen. The setting changes to a dim bar, where Folman is sitting with his old friend. The vision of the dogs has been his friend’s recurring nightmare. They discuss what it could mean in relation to their war experiences.
That night, Folman has his own nightmare of war. After reflecting on his recollections, he realizes that he cannot remember details of the most crucial episode, namely his proximity to the bloody massacres that took place in Beirut between Christians and Muslims. This sets him off on a quest to find his fellow soldiers, to see if they can help him piece together the circumstances that surround the mental gap.
Folman’s interviews with his former comrades are more than just questionnaires. They become explorations into personal memory and perception. The animation style allows the film to cut swiftly from an interviewee speaking to the camera to surreal depictions of their experiences. These illustrations are sometimes brutally, deadly serious; sometimes riotous and crazy. They show the tensions of young men thrown into a chaotic, violent, confusing foreign melee. One man remembers how his commander was shot in the head right next to him, and how he managed to escape a disastrous firefight. Another memory depicts soldiers ambushed in a placid grove by children with RPGs. Slow motion and the calm accompaniment of classical music make the scene surreal. The vicious fighting is contrasted with the alienation the soldiers feel when they return home, alongside the shrill, pounding 80s strains of Public Image Ltd’s “This Is Not A Love Song.”
The visual style of the movie works well with this kind of fractured memory, but it’s also very interesting in its own right. Apparently the technique used in Waltz with Bashir is a mix of various different kinds of animation. It’s often mistaken for rotoscoping (the technique used in A Scanner Darkly) but it’s actually based on flash and cutout animation with some 3-D and visual effects thrown in. The result is a film that sometimes looks shockingly realistic but at other times resembles a violent comic book. The scene that gives the film its name is especially impressive. In the streets of Beirut, one soldier grabs a machine gun, and in a berserk rage, spins and flails around in the middle of the highway, firing in all directions. His mad dance takes place in front of gigantic posters of the assassinated Lebanese politician Bashir Gemayel. The camera view spins rapidly around his grimacing comic book face, with the city’s skyscrapers and the smokestained sky flying by in the background and the flashing of gunfire punctuating every frame.
Even beyond the movie’s primary plot and its aesthetic presentation, it deals with really serious themes. One of Folman’s main concerns is his feeling of guilt over the massacre that happened only miles from where he stood guard. The interviews reveal a story in which each party involved assumed that someone else held responsibility for stopping the slaughter that they all vaguely knew was in progress. Folman’s recurring dream of war is one in which he and his fellow soldiers rise out of the ocean and walk into the city battle. “In dreams, the ocean represents fear and powerlessness,” a psychoanalyst tells him. The movie also touches upon the themes of a nation’s relation to war. The scene in which soldiers are on leave back home inspects the carelessness with which noncombatants can view warfare. Even the soldiers themselves are torn between the more banal aspects of their lives (girlfriends, dancing) and the carnage that lies only days away.
Ari Folman’s memories and questions are both particular and universal. They find a sophisticated expression in the harsh, dark, surreal scenes of Waltz with Bashir.
“Exciting,” “animated,” and “documentary” are probably not words you would have expected to go together, but this fascinating and unique movie makes them into an unforgettable combination.
