Honolulu Weekly

Waltz With Bashir / Lovers of good films should run, not walk, to see Waltz With Bashir, currently in limited release and scheduled to open in Honolulu on Feb. 13. They can then add a new film term—documation—to their repertoires, much better than The New Yorker’s term for the movie—“adult psychodocumentary combat cartoon.” More important than such pigeonholing is the movie itself, which displays innovation in more than new technique. The film successfully encompasses the psychology of its documentary subject, massacres at two refugee camps during the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war.

Directed by Ari Folman (himself an Israeli soldier during the event) and centering on the story by a soldier named Boaz, who relates the events (including dreams and bouts of guilt/depression) when Israeli combatants stood by as innocent Palestinian civilians were slaughtered by Christian troops. Folman had managed to suppress his memories of the incident, and, fascinated, sought to document it by interviewing participants—that is, some of those who stood by. The result is one of the best portraits of the effects of war on soldiers since John Huston’s documentary on shell-shocked American WWII veterans, some of which was long suppressed—as was Alfred Hitchcock’s coverage of the seven concentration camps immediately at the war’s end.

The director’s choice of technique for the doc was not photo-realism (except at the film’s very end) but animation achieved by shooting some of the events, including soldiers’ subsequent dreams and psychological episodes, live-action and then transferring that to stylized animation. As the soldiers’ recollections finally flow, we are both protected from and informed by the stylized images and sounds, removed somewhat but still able to “feel.” Buffs will recall a similar, if less sophisticated, technique used in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and 2006’s A Scanner Darkly.

This technique keeps us from being confined by “found footage” (which can be a distortion of the truth) or photo-realistic restaging, which omits psychological truths, except as offered by talking heads in interviews. Standard documentaries are as much defined by as what is left out as what is found. We are accustomed to PBS docs in which only still photos are used, but that can drain the emotions out of the material. It does require the audience to reconsider what animation can cover and achieve. Documation strives to present the mind’s eye of an event, the psychological and emotional truths as well as facts. Last year’s Persepolis, based on a graphic comic series, accomplished by a much simpler technique, proved that “serious” material can be enhanced by animation.

How off-putting is the new technique? It will be very off-putting for some, but probably not for the adventurous film-goer. More difficult to assimilate than advances in special effects (go-animation, computer-generated imagery), this advance in content, like all filmic storytelling, can be abused or sensationalized or misused in the guise of entertainment. In the hands of responsible filmmakers (those who write, shoot and edit their own material without interference from above), it can be an enhancement to ways of truth-telling—call it subjective truth-telling, from an individual’s point of view.

The question is this: should you go see Waltz With Bashir? Of course, you should. Some films are more important than others, and you should try this Waltz. Its music might last for a long time.