Review of “Waltz With Bashir”
From the dramatic opening shot of this film, you know you’re in for something extraordinarily different. The cinematic world we’re thrust into is heightened, dreamlike and haunting, an animated hallucination in blues and orange, wild dogs streaming through the streets, as relentless as the score. When we come out of the dream sequence, we’re still in an animated world, but now with writer and director Ari Folman having a drink with a friend in a bar. It’s the friend - Boaz - whose dog dream is in question, and he believes it has something to do with his days serving in the army twenty years earlier. He asks Folman – who served with him - to help unlock the riddle of his night time secrets. But Folman has no memory of the events of the war, and can remember nothing - until the following night that is, when his dream world is filled with an evocative sequence of dirty orange flares descending on Beirut. 
Slowly and carefully Folman takes us on a journey of remembering as he visits old friends who were also part of the fighting. Fantasy gives way to insinuation and insinuation to recollection. At some point you realise that this is not a fiction but a documentary, that the events are not fanciful and disturbing representations of the horror, Apocalypse Now-style, but the telling of what actually happened in 1982 when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon. You realize too, that the voices behind the animated faces are real people who were there.
Using a combination of careful pacing, a stunningly original graphic design approach that focuses us on carefully selected points of the screen – often the eyes of the characters involved, and the highly evocative music - which recalls Terrence Malick’s masterly war-film The Thin Red Line, Folman manages to fuse dream and reality with an emotional intensity that may well leave you racked in tears by the final frames. Much of the power of the film is clearly because Folman - in trying to purge a national memory – uses his own story to make it genuine and human. The young soldiers – Folman and his friends - are rendered fragile and tragic against the shameful processes of violent international politics, the impact of which will linger with you for a long while after you’ve left the cinema.
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