Review- Waltz with Bashir.

Waltz with Bashir starts with a nightmare. Twenty-six snarling dogs course through the streets of Tel Aviv, their eyes a bright and sickly yellow, eventually arriving at the apartment of Boaz, a friend of the film’s director, Ari Folman. As we learn of this recurring dream, we discover something even more disturbing. Folman and Boaz served in the Israeli army during the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war, and when his friend asks Folman if he has any nightmares or flashbacks, he says, “no.” He can’t remember a thing.
    And so the driving force of Folman’s extraordinary film is set in motion. For Folman, memory is anything but persistent, but the lack of it gnaws at him and brings him to the men he served with. We see stories—amazing, phantasmagoric stories—come to life as Folman’s military friends tell their stories and recount their dreams.
    As such, Waltz with Bashir is essentially a documentary, but it is actually a ground-breaking film that plumbs new ways to tell a cinematic story. Folman filmed his interviews, in typical talking heads style, but then transformed the visuals by animating them. At first glance, they look like the rotoscoped images made popular by Richard Linklater in Waking Life (not to mention those annoying “Talk to Chuck” ads). But Folman, one of Israel’s most acclaimed documentary filmmakers, used conventional, “hand-drawn” techniques to render the images.
    Why animate a documentary? Because Waltz with Bashir is about dreams, fears, and memories, as well as a retelling of real historical events. Folman’s quest to recover his own experiences, after all, takes him through a forest of visions, dreams and second-hand stories, which all register on screen with the same reality. As Folman begins to reconstruct his past, a haunting image replays itself—Israeli soldiers emerging from the sea and walking slowly into a city. And the film is filled with such resonant images. When Folman talks to a psychiatrist friend about his repression of memories, a child plays boisterously in the background—a blend of innocence and id that says much about Folman’s journey. And the war footage is as surreal and gripping as that of any “real” genre film.
    To some, Waltz with Bashir will offer a powerful history lesson about the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. To others it will just be a reminder. But it is also one of the most personal and affecting films about war ever made, filled with mysteries and insights that will affect you long after the screen goes dark.