Trance Dance

About this slideshow: Pictures taken from http://www.waltzwithbashir.com. Song used is entitled “Mouja no Koushin” (”Parade of the Dead”) by the band Girugamesh (Gilgamesh). Translation of the main lyrics is as follows:

They laugh indifferently at the repetition
Annoying voices going round and round
Laughing as they bring destruction
Destroy the crooked world

“The only way to do it was through animation,” director Ari Folman commented after the screening of his film Waltz With Bashir at the NY Film Festival. The preceding film was entirely in Hebrew and focused on the perils soldiers faced while serving in the first Lebanon War. It was also entirely animated—and by animated, I don’t mean lively.

The film opens with vicious black dogs running through a village and terrorizing people. The dogs’ barks and growls are clearly audible and emphasized over human activity in the scene thus creating a sense of doom and dominance. The main plot subsequently unwinds, beginning with a meeting between an animated Ari Folman and his filmmaker friend Ori Sivan. In this meeting, Folman describes his dreams of the dogs and of attempting to remember the Lebanon War.

From this point on, Folman takes the audience into a war-torn fantasy world. Soldiers’ experience make up a bulk of the storyline accompanied by a few instances involving visions and slightly confusing interpretations. One such vision is that of Folman escaping from his army’s ship and lying on top of a giant woman who is swimming ashore. He is seen tightly holding on to the woman while she swims to a place of comfort instead of a place of war. The main interpretation of the film, however, occurs when Folman’s commander seizes his friend’s machine gun and spits its rounds toward enemy soldiers. This violent dance is hence called his “waltz with Bashir,” Bashir being the former Lebanese president who was responsible for the slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims.

The only part where Waltz with Bashir breaks out of its cartoon-like feel is at the very end. The last scene shown is of a real-life Palestinian woman crying in her demolished village. In addition, the scene is given in monochrome to emphasize grief. Many say that this sense of reality should have been present throughout the whole film and that animation was an ineffective method of telling the story of war. Yet it should be realized that Waltz with Bashir is also a work of imagination; scenes such as soldiers slowly rising from easy, sunset-painted waters wouldn’t have worked if done by real actors. And although the movement of animated characters progresses in a drifting and boring manner, the animation itself still manages to take its audience somewhere foreign.

My last impression of Waltz with Bashir was soundly expressed by its director during the talk-back session. It’s not a film you would typically enjoy but if you want to experience a mindset that would be labeled creative, then you would want to see this film.