From the very beginning, Israeli director Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir plays like a nightmare come to life: Folman talks to a fellow veteran haunted by dreams of vicious dogs. Speaking with his friends, the director tries to recall his lost memories of a massacre of Palestinian refugees during Lebanon’s civil war, committed by Lebanese Christians but enabled by the Israeli military. He embraces the ambiguity of animation, mixing past and present, memory and dreams. Waltz With Bashir uses relatively conventional interview footage much of the time, but its flashbacks would be impossible to stage without extensive recreations. While such an approach risks aestheticizing violence, Folman avoids this pitfall. His film’s final five minutes are among recent cinema’s most devastating, cutting from his animated recollections to grainy video footage of screaming widows and rotting corpses. For all its flights of fancy, reality eventually comes back with a vengeance.
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