Waltz with Bashir

In reflecting upon his time spent in the Israeli army, filmmaker Ari Folman has produced WALTZ WITH BASHIR, a profoundly moving antiwar meditation that is equal parts personal memoir, history lesson, and animated fever dream. In 1982, Folman was a soldier during Israel's first invasion of Lebanon. This was a painful moment in history, when the newly elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, was killed in an explosion. Furious, his party, the Christian Phalangists, retaliated by storming into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacring thousands of innocent victims. Over 20 years later, Folman is disturbed to realize that he has no memory of this incident even though he was there at the time. In order to remember, he tracks down several of his friends and soldiers who were there with him to find out what really happened. WALTZ WITH BASHIR is as difficult to categorize as it is to forget. It is a truly startling achievement, a film that can be classified as animation and documentary and history and fiction. It is all of those things at once, and it is also much more than that. Folman uses a combination of Flash animation, 3D, and classic animation to bring his film to visual life, but it is the beautifully haunting score by acclaimed German composer Max Richter that provides the film with its heart and soul. As WALTZ WITH BASHIR unfolds in dreamlike waves, Folman understands that guilt is a dangerous thing, and war is even worse.

Cast:

4 stars out of 5 -- "That Folman and his team storyboarded and redrew all the interviews from scratch, creating a style both hallucinogenic and reverential, turns it into something exceptional." -- Jonathan Dean , (Total Film)

5 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he stark, high-contrast animation is the lifebreath of Folman's film...something gorgeously graphical and soaringly inventive." -- Dan Jolin , (Empire)

"Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen." -- Kenneth Turan , (Los Angeles Times)

"[A] memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film." -- A. O. Scott , (New York Times)

4 stars out of 5 -- "[Folman has] taken a documentary about his experiences as an Israeli Army conscript stationed in Lebanon during its civil war and turned it into a harrowing cartoon." -- Amy Nicholson , (Box Office)

Included in Entertainment Weekly's 2008 Films Of The Year -- "Ari Folman masters the hybrid form of an animated, autobiographical documentary -- and, in so doing, establishes a powerful new language for truth-telling." -- Lisa Schwarzbaum , (Entertainment Weekly)

3.5 stars out of 4 -- "[The film] is hallucinatory brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of war....Get ready to be knocked for a loop." -- Peter Travers , (Rolling Stone)

"[An] extraordinary and painfully timely autobiographical documentary of remembered life during wartime..." -- Grade: A -- Lisa Schwarzbaum , (Entertainment Weekly)

"WALTZ WITH BASHIR may be the year's most unusual animated film and also a deeply moving one....An innovatively conceived and poignant history lesson, unfolding as a kind of investigative documentary/mystery." -- Claudia Puig , (USA Today)

"WALTZ WITH BASHIR is a devastating animated film....The film is structured like a conventional documentary, with Folman visiting old army friends and piecing together what they saw and remember." -- Roger Ebert , (Chicago Sun-Times)

"BASHIR is a thinking person's horror movie, about horror and horrifying echoes: The parallels between the Holocaust and the massacres are pronounced." -- John Anderson , (Washington Post)

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