"It's always the same dream. Always 26 dogs coming for me.
Ari Folman's brilliant and harrowing Waltz with Bashir does something incredible: it captures the surreal reality of war in an oddly apt medium: animation. In an interview, Folman, who also wrote and produced the autobiographical film, said he never considered telling his story through "real-life video." The moving drawings quite literally illustrate the inexpressible anguish of loss, not only of human life, but of memory, identity and, for want of a better term, humanness.
Folman was a conscript during the 1982 Lebanon war which was sullied by the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although it was the Christian Phalangist militiamen who carried out the atrocity, they were allowed into the camps by an Israeli army content to stand guard outside. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli defence minister of the time, was informed of the danger of this but did nothing about it, and the killings remain a distinct wound to the nation's self-image and international reputation.
Though this is discussed with some horror, it is not what Waltz With Bashir is principally about. It is more about Folman's memories of being a soldier in the war and the way those memories seemed to have been expunged from his mind for some 20 years. He interviewed his friends, witnesses of the war and fellow soldiers to try to fill in the black hole in his past. Having done that, he had many of the film's real characters painted in outline and animated. The result was always going to be risky but it succeeds brilliantly as both art and a document for future generations.
The film opens with a pack of ferocious gray dogs charging down a city street, the cloudy night sky the same ominous yellow that glints in the creatures' eyes and teeth. We soon learn that this is the recurrent nightmare of Folman's friend, Boaz, but that unlike in most dreams, the dogs are not symbolic, but represent the 26 dogs the young soldier was forced to shoot during the war in Lebanon. Boaz recounts this experience at a bar with Folman, and asks his friend what haunts him about that time. When Folman realizes he has no answer, he is shocked into seeking the very details his psyche has so successfully blocked.
Folman eventually remembers a scene, though he cannot determine if it's a dream or memory, in which he and several Israeli soldiers float corpse-like at night in the sea near Beirut. Together they open their eyes and rise up naked, walking toward the shore of a high-rise city. This enigmatic vision will recur throughout the film. One of these soldiers, Carmi, now lives in Holland, so Folman travels to ask him about it. Cold and austere as the snow-covered fields he owns, Carmi cannot corroborate the event, but recalls a fantasy he had aboard his navy ship heading to war, in which he's rescued by a beautiful, naked giantess, and floated out to sea. Here, as in the rest of the film, the detailed animation allows a fluid transition between reality and fantasy, the frightened young soldier hugging the voluptuous goddess as she backstrokes him to safety.
Returning to Israel, Folman interviews other participants, including the famous Israeli war correspondent Ron Ben Yisahi, who had covered the street fighting in Beirut. In September 1982, the Israeli Army entered West Beirut to support the Christian Phalangists upon the assassination of their leader, the charismatic Bashir Gemayel, who had recently been elected President of Lebanon. Israeli troops surrounded the Sabra and Shatila camps, and at night provided illumination rounds, as the Phalangist forces entered the camps, presumably to find Palestinian combat fighters. In fact, a truce had allowed these men safe passage to Tunisia two weeks earlier. After two days of fighting, it became clear that an estimated 3,000 refugees had been massacred.
The climactic waltz with Bashir occurs late in the film when an Israeli soldier, Shmuel Frenkel, exposing himself to a barrage of sniper fire, leaps into a West Beirut intersection plastered with posters of Bashir Gemayel and starts shooting - or waltzing - like a madman. He's like a crazed superhero, even more so because he's animated, but the nuanced style, with its noir-ish contrasts and subtle colours, places him firmly on the ground. Folman's choice to keep the animation realistic never lets us forget that these are real people, whose traumas linger more than 20 years later. And at the film's close, when Folman remembers where he had really been in September 1982, the director switches to actual documentary footage of screaming women fleeing the refugee camps toward the Israeli troops outside. And it breaks your heart.
If the animation weren't so powerfully dramatic, even magical at times, Folman, an ordinary man rather than an overtly political grunt, could never have swung all this and also included some humour and irony. His footage speaks for itself. It suggests a haunted conscience; Folman - the son of parents who survived Auschwitz - thinks this was why the memory of his time in the army were blanked out for so long. What is astonishing is how vividly it has now been brought back to life and how it links with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this David Polonsky, the film's chief illustrator, and Yoni Goodman, its head animator, deserve as much praise as Folman. Max Richter's score is also of tremendous brilliance.
Painting each frame of Waltz With Bashir took almost four years and many doubted it could be done. But there is no question that the result is one of the most resonant films of its year from any source, and quite probably a landmark in animation. It combines hallucinatory dreamscapes, the horrors of hard truth and a natural beauty of expression that has not often been matched before. Never mind that some in Israel thought it not radical enough.
And in the end it remains a soldier's story, not a polemic and, watching it, you see a view of the war that sticks in the back of your head not because it is a political diatribe but because it is an intensely human document that seeks to be true to one man's view of what has come to be known as Israel's Vietnam.
Extraordinary.
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