Waltz with Bashir 2008

The best film I've seen all year.

G. Dellabarca Nobody (?)

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Intelligent, gripping, powerful, visually mesmerizing, I just love this movie. Hands down the best film I've seen all year, and I've seen well over a hundred.

It's about an ex-Israeli soldier who can't remember anything from the Lebanon war. He decides to try and get his memories back by talking to old friends who served with him. As they tell their stories, the fog starts to lift and eventually his memory comes flooding back.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR was first shot as a traditional documentary, and the voices from those interviews and discussions are the ones in the film. The final visuals are all animated though, and what beautiful evocative animation it is. The images brought to life are gritty but bathed in a vaguely dream-like light. For me it perfectly captures the way your memory slightly distorts things.

It's also a history lesson, as I knew nothing about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon before watching the film. The arbitrary destruction that transpires is shocking and it's depiction makes this a powerful anti-war movie.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR played at Cannes this year, and it won Best Animated Feature at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. This film is the Israeli entry for Best Foreign Film at the upcoming Oscars where it is hotly tipped for the award. Go see it and find out why.

Pul-eeease!

keeshy Flicks Superstar (?)

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No, no, no. No visual or conceptual charm in this film for me. I fell asleep due to utter boredom. The animation was simplistic and dull, and served to distance the viewer from any attachment to the narrative, although the stories themselves had the potential to be very moving. My partner loved it as he understands war, follows middle eastern politics and loves documentary. Nada for me on all three accounts - I went because the reviews were so good - but surely this film would only appeal to those ticking the boxes above, Instead I was disappointed and grumpy.

Gripping but underproduced

maetl Nobody (?)

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Going on emotional and intellectual content alone, this is a must-see historical and personal journey.

Animation and production leaves a lot to be desired, and the soundtrack is choppy and abrupt in parts, but the roughness fits ok with the theme. If you accept the style, you get used to it about a 1/3rd of the way in, as the dream-like imaginings start to transform into real memories.

The piecing together of memories works in tandem with a pseudo-documentary format to provide a complete picture. If you need perfectionate attention to detail, you will be disappointed - this is no obsessive anime masterpiece, but it is an interesting, unique, and very moving slice of cinema.

You could judge parts of the depiction of events as having a certain bias, but it presents the events up front in a way that has not been done before from an Israeli perspective - a story about individual human beings rather than the abstraction of "army" or "state". The use of 'Nazi' as a reference was subtle and carefully placed to explode in the audiences minds: like domestic violence on a smaller scale, this cycle of war keeps repeating and repeating and repeating. As a historical piece and a reminiscence, there are no answers, just the futility and rage of the hell on earth that they have created.