(Writer's Note: This film was viewed during the 2008 Ottawa International Animation Festival. Look for an upcoming interview with animation director David Polonsky)
Twenty-six ravening dogs explode from the screen, hurling themselves down the narrow street. Their eyes are yellow, their mouths hungry for blood. People scatter, mothers try to shield their children. But the dogs don't stop; they congregate below an apartment balcony, where a former Israeli veteran waits. They sit patiently, waiting to rip his flesh from his bones.
So begins Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about one man's journey to remember. In 1982, Ari Folman was a 19-year-old soldier in the Israeli army during the ill-fated Lebanon War. When that country's charismatic president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated by members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, members of his Christian Phalangist party took revenge, killing over 1,700 Palestinian civilians in what would be later called the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres.
It's believed that Israeli forces indirectly assisted the Phalange militia in committing the atrocity, by surrounding the refugee camps, shelling them before the Phalange invaded, and firing flares so that the Phalangists could see what they were doing.
Waltz With Bashir: The Struggle to Remember
Much of the film is about the way emotion, and trauma, colour one's memory. Folman, in his struggle to remember the events surrounding the massacre, interviews fellow veterans and Israelis, getting their stories and experiences during the Israeli-Lebanon war. Whether it's a soldier killing a RPG-toting child in an orchard, or a tank gunner dealing with guilt after his tank is ripped apart by shells, leaving him the only survivor, the movie is unflinching in its depiction of war.
And yet the Flash animation gives these horrific events a dreamlike quality that suits the retrospective (and introspective) nature of the film. Director Folman, and art director David Polonsky juxtapose the brutality of war with surreal images, such as one soldier's recurring vision of a nude water goddess, who takes him in her arms and carries him away from his burning assault boat.
These dreamlike elements makes the climax all the more jarring, when the curtain is finally pulled, making the horror of the massacre naked in all its gory detail.
Ari Folman's Guilt Over Horror
"We were the Nazis," a fellow veteran tells Folman in one heart-breaking scene. "We followed the orders and helped in the slaughter of innocents."
That language is even more telling when one realizes how sensitive Israelis are about the Holocaust. The notion that Jews (who consider themselves the main victims of Hitler's death camps) could be capable of assisting in an atrocity like the Holocaust is beyond sobering.
Waltz With Bashir is no family film; it is unflinching in its depiction of the futility of war. But it is quite possibly the bravest movie released this year, and certainly the gutsiest animated film of 2008. Also, Folman and Polonsky assembled a first-rate film on a paltry $2 million budget, and using the much-maligned Flash animation platform. It receives a well-deserved 8/10.
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