Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Razor Film, Les Films D'ici, ARTE

Description

In this favourite from 2008's Cannes Film Festival, animation and documentary meld with critically acclaimed results. Director Ari Folman filmed a number of interviews about people's experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War, and then this live-action footage was turned into striking animation by a team of talented artists.

Tags

Oscar nomination, 1980s, Middle East, Lebanon, Israel

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan

Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. More than that, in its seamless mixing of the real and the surreal, the personal and the political, animation and live action, it's unlike any film you've seen, period.
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10 Reel | Chris Cabin

Like Folman's disbelief of his own actions, the animation process allows the audience to exist in stasis, unprepared to witness the all-too-real atrocities that came out of 1980s Israel, which might as well be present-day Israel.
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10 The Independent | Jonathan Romney

Waltz with Bashir comes across as a sincere, personal and deeply painful undertaking that lets neither its maker nor his nation off the hook. It's a brave and necessary film, remarkably inventive and, against all odds, grimly entertaining too.
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10 efilmcritic.com | Mel Valentin

Avoiding the pitfalls of well-meaning, but often dull, “talking heads” documentaries, Folman decided to animate the interviews, "Waking Life"-style and recreate his interviewees words in sound and images. It’s a decision that allows a unity of artistic vision that both honors his interviewees’ words and finds profundity in them as well.
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9.0 New York Times | A. O. Scott

“Waltz With Bashir” is not, and could not be, the definitive account of the Lebanon war or the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Instead it’s a collage and an inquiry. “Can’t a film be therapeutic?” one of Mr. Folman’s friends asks him early in the movie, and in a way everything that follows is an attempt to answer that question and interrogate its premise. It depends on what is meant by therapy, and on who is undergoing it.
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8.8 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Folman gradually fits together a puzzle with the massacre at the center and his witnesses in concentric rinds at various distances. Who knew what was happening? Which Israeli commanders were in a position to stop it?
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8.8 Rolling Stone | Peter Travers

What's on view in Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, submitted for Oscar consideration by Israel as both foreign-language film and animated feature, is hallucinatory brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of war
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8.8 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

e can only speculate that Folman eventually lost interest in the idea of memory, which justifies the film's gorgeous, powerful presentation, and decided to focus instead on a "horrors of war" theme, which -- let's face it -- has been done at least 40 other times this year alone. But up to that point, which, to be fair, is very late in the game, Waltz with Bashir is an extraordinary work.
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8.3 The Onion A.V. Club | Tasha Robinson

In the end, he finds few answers—his film is more impressionistic portrait and meditation on memory than serious journalistic inquiry into the South Lebanon massacre at the center of his mental block.
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8.3 The Onion A.V. Club | Tasha Robinson

The trouble with Bashir’s extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people.
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8.0 DVD Talk | Jamie S. Rich

Despite all its faults, Waltz With Bashir is an extremely effective use of two disparate mediums--documentary and animation--to explore the links between "what really happened" and "what we think happened," and how easily truth is altered on the way. It also delivers a startling emotional punch in bringing home its message about the dehumanizing effects of war.
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8.0 PopMatters.com | Bill Gribon

It’s a documentary and a denouncement, an explanation and an exaggeration - and in the end, it’s one of 2008’s best films, a wildly inventive and shockingly effective cartoon trance that takes us deep into the heart of human darkness and then delves even deeper.
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6.0 Eye For Film | Ali Hazzah

... with Palestinians depicted as nameless entities, without even an excuse of a personality, Folman provides the sort of mono-dimensional characters that flaw other movies from the region, or, for that matter, old school cowboy and Injun' movies in the US.
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