Dong Kim screenign response: Waltz with Bashir

In class, Waltz with Bashir is introduced as an animated documentary. I have never thought of the film that way before, but after thinking about it, the film has every reason to be a documentary, except that ‘real’ footages are substituted with animated images. Also, it is a very subjective film that flips between past and present to search the missing truth. It deals with the real people and real incident that happened.
Although some characters are fictional, the film basically tells the story from the director’s experience. The protagonist is named Ari, and he is the reflection of the director Ari Folman. The interview of Folman that we watched in class helped me organize my thoughts. He said that he does not care whether it is called a documentary or a fiction film, as long as it is his story. Ari Folman had gone through the Lebanon War himself. Although he did not actually lose memory or anything, he did wanted to let people know of this very real event of massacre by the soldiers, which was slowly being forgotten by the world. The plot of trying to find the missing memory and subjective truth in the film is a symbolism of trying to remember the brutality of war.
However, he knows that he can only tell his version of reality. I loved this piece subjectivity compared to other films and documentaries about war. In the film, Ari’s conversation with Lebanon War Veterans is a way to glue many different people’s versions of reality together and naturally lead to the subjective truth of the director himself.
One important thing about this animation-documentary is that the animation format is used in order to stay away from the objectivity. It holds the soldiers’ point of view, and some random animated moments, such as the vision of a goddess rising from the sea, are used to express the mentality of the people fought in the war. This is why I think that the animation format suits this film perfectly, while I wasn’t so enthusiastic about Chicago 10’s use of animation. In Waltz with Bashir, animation was used to create something that is unable to be expressed in real time movie, such as the subjectively stylized, dream-like visions of characters as well as reconstructing the past event, while in Chicago 10, the animation made the line between objective and subjective reality very vague and thus less persuasive(at least for me).