Film Review - Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir (2008) is an animated film by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman. The film is actually an autobiographical war documentary regarding Folman himself, as he tries to piece together his lost memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, in which he was a soldier in. Folman has no clear recollection of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was the massacre of between 800 and a few thousand innocent Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites by order of the Israeli Army, that took place over a couple of days. The incident since left a great deal of silence and the crimes were unanswered for and not dealt with, despite slaughtering innocent civilians, including children. In the film, Folman tracks down old friends from the war and talks to them about it, in the hopes to bring back his blurry memory of the tragic incident that occurred and where he was during it.  

  

Figure. 1. Walts with Bashir poster.

With Folman’s choice to not only create a film that is a documentary, but also an animated one, might first be considered an odd approach, but in fact works perfectly for what the film tries and succeeds to achieve. “The film is structured like a conventional documentary, with Folman visiting old army friends and piecing together what they saw and remember. The freedom of animation allows him to visualize what they tell him - -even their nightmares.” (Ebert, 2009) The consistent style of animation not only draws the audience into the events, attracting them visually, but it also allows the descriptive war stories to be met to their full potential and visually displayed without limits. The use of animation also allows more graphic imagery to be shown, as whatever is happening to the characters in the story follows true events, and as the animation is an artistic medium rather than real life footage, it provides a level of censorship to what it can show on screen. Considering it is a documentary style film that closely follows real war and violence, the animation subconsciously allows it to seem less true and confrontational towards the audience, which might seem odd for a film that sets to raise awareness of the awful events, but by the end of the film it certainly makes sense as to why it would take this approach for the film. The animation sets a general mood which provides the right amount of emotion for the audience to feel, but simultaneously layers it to make it seem slightly more light-hearted.  

  

Waltz with Bashir does not just use animation to allow the story to be told in a slightly different tone, it is also visually beautiful and uses spectacular colours to emphasize the nature of this world. It is also important to keep in mind that the style of animation portrays a sense of maturity and reality, which invites the audience to watch and digest, without getting distracted at all by an overly soft styled animation that they might be used to witnessing in more family friendly films. “The film uses hyperreal rotoscope-animation techniques, similar to those made famous by Bob Sabiston and Richard Linklater. Live-action footage on videotape has been digitally converted into a bizarre dreamscape in which reality is resolved into something between two and three dimensions. Planes and surfaces stir and throb with colours harder, sharper, brighter than before. It looks like one long hallucination, and therefore perfect for the trauma of Folman’s recovered memories.” (Bradshaw, 2008)  

  

Figure. 2. Waltz with Bashir film still.

During Folman’s journey to uncover his faded memory of the massacre, he has discussions with friend after friend, who provide information each time, not only to Folman but also to the audience who in some cases might have no knowledge of the Lebanon War. Folman’s film is telling a very real and serious story to the audience, and while his character in the film continues to search for information on what happened, the audience get to be on the same boat as him, obviously having no memory of it themselves either, but naturally eager to discover more. As Folman gets more answers that slowly help to piece this puzzle together, the mystery begins to become answered. The important moment that the film has been building up to gradually, is made aware of early on, alerting the audience that all of this unraveling of information is leading to that strong impact of a climax point. In the moments leading up to the aftermath of the massacre, the heinous crime is exposed to the audience and told. As the film takes the viewers into the annihilated neighborhood, you can immediately notice the destruction and hopeless victims as they stumble around in response to the massacre carried out by the militia. During the witnessing of these scenes, the filter of animation suddenly drops and real live camera footage is shown at the exact same location. It snaps to the blunt reality of death, suffer and loss throughout the destruction, where real people can be seen screaming and crying in response to the suffering, as well as the piles of bodies of innocent citizens. The real footage also capturing dead infants has a shockingly heartbreaking impact, displaying the unspeakable horrors that occurred. As mentioned earlier, the use of animation for this film works perfectly for these circumstances. This is because it approaches all these occurrences more calmly, but then the animation is massively contrasted when the film switches to live action. It causes a stronger impact for this reason at the right moment in the story, exposing how real all of the tragedy actually is. “There is a woman screaming and crying. She shouts “my son, my son” in Arabic. She repeats again and again in Arabic “take photos, take photos,” “where are the Arabs, where are the Arabs.” But her words are not subtitled; she is just a screaming woman and her words are irrelevant and incomprehensible.” (Antoun, 2009) Though this might seem disrespectful to rob this innocent woman of what she has to say, it resembles the blatant ignorance towards this by society, and confronts the vile act with anger that justice was never served, and that the crimes are unanswered for, as if brushed off and ignored.  

Illustrations List

Figure. 1. IMDb, Waltz with Bashir film poster. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185616/ [Accessed 04/02/19] 

Figure. 2. The Guardian, Waltz with Bashir film still.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/21/waltz-with-bashir-folman  [Accessed 04/02/19]

Bibliography 

Antoun N. (2009) https://electronicintifada.net/content/film-review-waltz-bashir/3547 [Accessed 04/02/19] 

Bradshaw P. (2008) https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/21/waltz-with-bashir-folman [Accessed 04/02/19] 

Ebert R. (2009) https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 [Accessed 06/02/19]