Waltz with Bashir (2008)

The greatest movie ever!

Really Surprised!

Excellent but underrated film

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

I am usually rating movies based on their genre. Since there are few animated documentaries around, this by itself would place Vals Im Bashir pretty high, but while I was trying to find flaws in the film, I realized that I am having difficulty doing that. Perhaps the only one that makes sense is that the animation is very basic, Adobe Flash like, other than that, it is something that touches on both factual and emotional level, without being heavy handed.To put it in perspective, it is the story of an Israeli man trying to understand why he forgot what happened during the war in Lebanon and his journey to remembering. It is not a propaganda film, but a personal documentary film of the director's journey: the man in the film.I can only recommend it.

The psychological conflict of the war brilliantly explained I must say this animation is very similar to the story of a book. Achieve illustrate all without taste of war, human stupidity, feelings and small flashes of humanity that can go into a war.Walts with Bashir could be described as a well-narrated film without vices or propaganda.Quickly, the story grabs you and you live the torments of characters in each of the situations presented.This is a film that should be present in the election of a film lover.For me completely exceeded my expectations, so I evaluated with 10

A documentary. A war drama. A historical account. A biography. Waltz with Bashir qualifies as each one of these, in addition to being a gripping & powerful tale being told through the medium of animation. Depicting the horrors of war in an emotionally engaging manner, this animated documentary only gets more unsettling as the story progresses.The story of Waltz with Bashir is narrated in two timelines. The first one is set in present day Israel and finds Ari Folman, this film's director, meeting & interviewing fellow veterans of the First Lebanon War, the time period he happens to have no recollection of despite serving in the military that time. The second timeline is set in 1982 and illustrates Israel's invasion of Lebanon.Written & directed by Ari Folman, who also stars in the film as himself, Waltz with Bashir is crafted with immaculate precision, composure & attention to detail from start to finish and is brought to life in a unique manner, thanks to its pioneering animation which resembles a comic book illustration. The script is deftly penned down & its transition on the film canvas is thoroughly captivating.Technical aspects exhibit a lot of inventiveness here for its Cinematography makes stellar use of its camera, colour hues & lighting to expertly capture the feel & flavour of this story. Editing brilliantly paces its 90 minutes of story and makes sure each sequence plays a role in the final print. Max Richter's score is absolutely fitting. And the animated characters are splendidly voiced & also appear similar to their respective real-life figures.On an overall scale, Waltz with Bashir is an aesthetic, artistic & surreal piece of cinema that presents its writer-director in complete control of his craft as he attempts to regain the lost memories of his service in the First Lebanon War and in the process ends up adding a new chapter to the manual of filmmaking. A work of quality that will be able to score highly no matter what genre(s) one puts it into, Waltz with Bashir comes strongly recommended.

This is a film heavily about memory, about the filmmaker's memory of his part as an IDF draftee in the Lebanese War of '82, about, perhaps, a nation's collective memory of having had to escape all that and the hallucinative boundaries of 'truth'. It's the third of three consecutive films I saw in as many days, where Israeli filmmakers bring to cinematic life their traumatizing personal experience of war, the other two being Kippur and Lebanon.In a way, all good film is about memory. It may not be expressly the subject matter, or indeed the filmmaker's personal memory, as here, but the function of imagining, which is the same function as dreaming and remembering, wouldn't work unless we had deeply embedded images in ourselves and the ability to recall them before us. We do, unimaginably rich stores of images, dynamic, evolving in time as is memory.And it can be said, without being too fussy about it, that everything we see are reflections of images put before the mind, illusory in nature. This is not the same as being false, but we'll get to that. The conundrum? Explaining this unreality in words reduces, it's a clumsy burden. If the mind is like a mirror, it's like touching the spot on the mirror you want to show, smudged the moment you do. So great art to my mind, like meditation, is the effort to touch without touching, to draw transparent air between ourselves and images. This touching without touching also applies to viewing a film.So here we have a filmmaker on a journey of memory, not trying to unearth simply some obscure corner but the whole story of a past self, the story as a single image. It's a Citizen Kane of sorts, with the filmmaker in the role of 'reporter' visiting friends and acquaintances of old as he begins to fill the picture.It's flawed, in that what it explains point blank about memory and dissociation is slim stuff, notation instead of music. It obscures truths by intellectual analysis, as much so as Waking Life does with dreams. Thankfully, those moments are few and you can brush them aside with ease.What's really worth it here, is puzzling a bit about the nature of this. Oddly pitched as a documentary, but it's not. How could it be? It's about a dreaming self who twists images. Malleable reality before our eyes. What it is, wonderfully so, is a narrator 're-discovering' his story.So it's fitting to have it be animated, every image constructed, illusory. And how rich the illusion! Some of it obvious hallucination, some of it unreal impression, some of it absurdly real. Some of it from the point-of-view of others. Utterly evocative as a whole, especially the dance.He tethers all these images into his story, wonderful images. As he does, the mysterious image of boys emerging from sea acquires all these different shades of reality, gradually becoming more 'real' as they light up his night sky. It's a magical scene that recurs several times in the film.This is the 'truth' here, peeling away different layers to discover the original image. This image is the last we see, a shattering moment in the film. The rest of the story as only the vessel to having witnessed the moment, the softening of edges of truth as we swim there.So a bit of Zen to meditate upon. Who is that self who witnesses the scene of distraught women? I mean as you watch the film, what is he to you? Is he another character being recalled? Is he the narrator causing the story to be remembered years later? Is he the original self 'found' again, or not? You must study this.