Waltz with Bashir

Review

The animation Movie Waltz with Bashir was written and directed by Ari Folman. It was released in 2008 and is supposedly based on Ari Folman’s - the main character - experiences and involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War. The Movie is set around Israel, and Lebanon, though the land of Palestine is not mentioned, the people are a big part of the movie.

I am going to try to stay professional and not get too opinionated but that’s not guaranteed because the involvement of both Palestine and Israel made me worry about how I might judge this movie. The plot is mostly around Folman’s struggle to remember his involvement in the war. He visited friends who were also part of his military group and interviewed them. Partly the veterans of the war tried ways to escape from the trauma of the war including watching porn. The big enemy to the Israelis I saw was the Phalangist. None of their forces seemed identifiable and when shown they were either fighting the Israeli Army or executing Palestinians families at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

The theme about the consequences of war isn’t only about the negatives that victims experience, though that was the main focus of the movie. I think who won is and or who was the hero is a story to be twisted and told for political power in the feature. Though I have no first hand experience of the extent of the memory issue Folman had, I could definitely understand how much a war can impact a people.

I was captivated by the animations, not as much with typical children animations I have seen so I will attribute part of the captivation to my preconceived notion of what the movie will deliver. The use of depth and space to create emotion in the faces of the characters was satisfying for me. I started imagining how it will be to write code to directly render this.

I know I needed more background story maybe but I hated it that the enemy was just the enemy without obvious causes that we know or are told. Even the title having Bashir in it is some way because Bashir barely has his pictures shown at the end and not a big part of the movie. A kid comes sneaking in the trees with a big gun, who the heck is that kid I never found out, but obviously he was a bad guy and needed to be dealt with swiftly.

A point of influence that’s very obvious at least to me was when the veterans tried watching porn to escape their trauma, I think that is in one way showing their struggle and in another way telling viewers that watching porn is a way to escape from your problems. The movie has a 8 out of 10 rating on IMDb and I thought that was fair. But the content and what is it about and how the story has panned out so far, I wouldn’t rate this that high. I don’t feel bad for it either because the first person I saw on IMDb rate the movie 10 out of 10 mentioned about the subjectiveness of the director, implying their liking it is heavily subjective, so can I be a bit subjective too?

Irrespective of my initial concerns, I will definitely recommend this movie to any objective viewer as it’s a great movie preaching anti-war messages with spectacular animations and storyline. But I will give it a 2 out of 5 star only because I think any over-emotional human can have their world-view of some people completely twisted and re-moulded by this movie.