Waltz With Bashir

It was appropriate that I watched this film the week after our experimental documentary conversation, because it made me think more about the definition of a documentary. The film is based on real interviews with Israeli soldiers who fought in the Lebanon War, and it tells the story of the director’s search for the truth about what happened during a massacre in Beirut that he has repressed his memory of.

Ari Folman said in an interview that it was a mistake for him to have called the film an animated documentary, because no one knows what that means and they have a hard time categorizing it in their minds. I can see what he’s saying, because just like with Chicago 10, it’s difficult for me to accept this as a truly documented story when all of the visuals are created by artists. Waltz with Bashir felt less like a cartoon than Chicago 10 to me though, maybe because the subject matter was so dramatic and the animation had a more stylized look to it.

I really enjoyed the film, and thought it did an effective job of telling a complex story. The storyline revolves around this hallucination/partial memory that the director has of the war, and he is trying to piece together where it came from by talking to other soldiers who were there with him. The hallucination scene, and many others in the film, have a dream-like quality that partially give the film that stylized look. In a lot of the scenes, especially the flashbacks or the dream scenes, the characters are moving in slow motion, which amplifies the surreal feeling of the film. In one of the special features on the DVD, Folman talks about the process of making the animation, and said that part of the reason the characters moved slowly was that it was cheaper that way. So whether or not the technique was intentional, it certainly added a moodiness that worked well.

I think one of the hardest things about documentary is trying to visually illustrate an event that has already happened, or a concept that you don’t have actual footage of. We’ve seen this done with archival footage like in Wide Awake, or with re-enactments like in A Thin Blue Line. I assume part of the reason the director chose animation for this film is because almost the entire storyline fell under things that already happened or ideas that there was no footage for (like the hallucinations). Considering those restrictions, I think animation was a creative way to be able to tell the story without having to narrate the entire film. I’m still not sure you can really classify this as a documentary, but I’m definitely starting to broaden my perspective on what that genre means.