Waltz with Bashir

You’ve heard the stories – young man goes off to war, comes back with nightmares and post traumatic stress syndrome. Some of these men are doomed to relive the worst of their experiences until the end of time. Others, in some ways, are lucky, and can push their memories, whether consciously or subconsciously, away to the hidden depths of their minds to be untouched for years, maybe even forever.

Waltz with Bashir deals with a member of the latter group, who is actually the director, Ari Folman. After a friend comes to him for advice about a strange dream involving twenty-six dogs, he begins to have dreams about the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, although he has no recollection whatsoever of his part in the event. And so begins Mr. Folman’s journey into the recesses of his brain, seeking out comrades who survived the Lebanese War with their memories intact in an attempt to piece together his own part in “the massacre.”

“This film was always meant to be an animated film. I never thought there was a chance to do it any other way — not as a fiction film, and definitely not as a classic documentary film,” declared Mr. Folman in the moments before the film began. Indeed, the documentary would have come across much differently if it had been live action. The gritty art style hinted at realism, but created a shadowy world of death and destruction, brilliantly depicting the horrors of war, by using darker shades of colors. Because the film explored people’s nightmares, daydreams, and memories, the animation was able to create scenes, such as the stampede of dogs, that otherwise would have been impossible.

Despite the beauty of its animation, however, the film was simply too long, the message too abstract. What I got was a series of interviews with random men, with equally random scenes set during a war. The narration could not keep me sufficiently informed. At the conclusion of the film, all I could say about it was, “I don’t get it.”