Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir could eas­ily be filed away under any or all of the fol­low­ing gen­res: doc­u­men­tary, auto­bi­og­ra­phy, mem­oir, jour­nal­ism, and non­fic­tion. If there’s one thing all of these have in com­mon, it’s that none make for nat­ural car­toons. The excep­tion that proves the rule is Mar­jane Satrapi’s Perse­po­lis (read The Dork Report review), which began life as a pair of graphic nov­els before being adapted into an ani­mated fea­ture film. Waltz With Bashir takes the oppo­site route, start­ing as a film and end­ing up as a book. Could ani­mated ver­sions of Joe Sacco’s Pales­tine and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale be far behind?

Fol­man has lost his mem­o­ries of a key expe­ri­ence dur­ing his ser­vice in the Israel Defense Forces dur­ing the 1982 war in Lebanon. A con­ver­sa­tion with a friend sparks a frag­ment of mem­ory involv­ing the Sabra and Shatila mas­sacre. The Israeli Defense Force sur­rounded Pales­tin­ian refugee camps in Beirut, but stood by as the Pha­langists, a Chris­t­ian Lebanese mili­tia, entered and mas­sa­cred a still unknown num­ber of Pales­tin­ian civil­ians. Was he really there, as he now seems to rec­ol­lect? Did he have any­thing to do with it?

Fol­man speaks of mem­ory as “some­thing stored in my sys­tem,” as if his brain were merely a com­puter, dis­as­so­ci­ated from any cul­pa­bil­ity in the mas­sacre. He merely wit­nessed it, but it was enough for him to sub­con­sciously erase his mem­o­ries over the inter­ven­ing years. He seeks out old com­rades in the search of some­one else who served with him and may help fill in the blanks in his mem­ory. Like a detec­tive story, the search for clues pro­vides a use­ful sto­ry­telling device while pro­vid­ing an episodic nar­ra­tive structure.

The title refers to a fel­low sol­dier that madly waltzed with a machine gun while sur­rounded on all sides by Lebanese fight­ers. “Bashir” is Bashir Gemayel, the assas­si­nated Pha­langist com­man­der lion­ized by Lebanese, and a celebrity on a scale that one Israeli likens to how he felt about David Bowie.

Fol­man is an artist as well as a film­maker; at one point he asks one of his old friends if it’s OK to sketch his fam­ily dur­ing their inter­view. His visual sense man­i­fests in Waltz With Bashir’s stun­ning images, com­po­si­tion, and color. Like Star Wars: The Clone Wars (read The Dork Report review) and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Com­plex, it fea­tures stiff, sim­pli­fied char­ac­ters atop fully-rendered 3D envi­ron­ments. Human faces are crudely ren­dered with small looped expres­sions, when not totally still (note that the 2D vec­tor ani­ma­tion is not the same tech­nique used in Wak­ing Life or A Scan­ner Darkly). They con­trast sharply with the fluid move­ment of the detailed, com­plexly lit vehi­cles, back­grounds, and weapons. If such styl­ized human fig­ures were a delib­er­ate artis­tic choice, what is to be gained? A few pos­si­ble explanations:

• As recent CGI movies like Final Fan­tasy: The Spir­its Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf have proven to their detri­ment, the uncanny val­ley (the point at which a sim­u­la­tion of a human becomes almost, but not quite, real­is­tic and thus creeps audi­ences out) is a very real prob­lem fac­ing ani­ma­tors as tech­nol­ogy pro­gresses. All three of these are tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vels, but the human char­ac­ters are still just one step away from dead-eyed zombies.
• In the most prac­ti­cal sense, ani­ma­tion is use­ful to cre­ate images of his­tor­i­cal events where no cam­eras were present. Fol­man does recount see­ing jour­nal­ist Ron Ben-Yishai boldly film the afore­men­tioned fire­fight in which his friend had his machine-gun-waltz with Bashir, so per­haps some actual footage existed for reference.
• The dream­like unre­al­ity of ani­ma­tion plays into Folman’s theme of the muta­bil­ity of memory.
• Like Isao Takahata’s stun­ning Grave of Fire­flies, ani­ma­tion makes it slightly eas­ier to watch painful images. Takahata’s emo­tion­ally drain­ing film involved a lit­tle girl slowly starv­ing to death after the World War II fire­bomb­ing of Japan, and Waltz With Bashir fea­tures such images as a field full of dying horses and the corpse of a child buried in rub­ble. The end of the film snatches away this dis­tanc­ing tech­nique; we finally see archival footage of the massacre’s aftermath.

Is it fair to crit­i­cize the film for tak­ing the Israeli point of view in a story about the Sabra and Shatila mas­sacre? Save for one woman that appears in the actual footage seen at the end, Pales­tini­ans lit­er­ally don’t have a voice in the film. But nei­ther, for that mat­ter, do the Pha­langists. In the case of this his­tor­i­cal event, Israelis were pas­sive bystanders, nei­ther vic­tims (as they were dur­ing the Holo­caust) nor oppres­sors (as they are now over the Pales­tini­ans — I invite objec­tions in the com­ments below, please). If to bluntly ask what Waltz With Bashir is for, it does three things: First, it’s a med­i­ta­tion upon the com­plex­ity and unre­li­a­bil­ity of human mem­ory. Sec­ond, it’s an act of jour­nal­ism; return­ing the Sabra and Shatila Mas­sacre to the pub­lic con­scious­ness. Third, it’s one man’s per­sonal com­ing to terms with his past.

Offi­cial movie site: www.waltzwithbashir.com

Buy the DVD and graphic novel from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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