Product Description

OVER 20 YEARS AGO, ARI SERVED IN THE CHAOTIC WAR IN LEBANON. NOW HE & HIS FELLOW ISRAELI VETERANS SUFFER FROM MISSING MEMORIES & STRANGE, SURREAL DREAMS. WHAT HIDDEN TRUTHS DO THEIR NIGHTMARES MASK? ARI'S QUEST LEADS TO HIS MOST TROUBLING SECRET, KEPT EVEN FROM HIMSELF.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3327 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2009-06-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Hebrew
• Subtitled in: English
• Dubbed in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
Waltz with Bashir presents an intriguing riddle: is a documentary still a documentary if it's animated? Taking over where fact-based animations like Waking Life and Chicago 10 left off, Israel’s Ari Folman tries to wrap his head around 1982's Lebanon War (the title refers to Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel). Why do disturbing dreams plague his former army colleagues, while he remembers nothing? Folman meets with nine of them to find out. As they speak, animators recreate their experiences, but instead of rotoscoping or video-capture, Folman first shot his film on video and then assembled an animated version from the resulting storyboards. This graphic-novel approach suits their strange, surrealistic stories and parallels the work of Black Hole's Charles Burns, who tends to walk on the shadowy side (as opposed to Marjane Satrapi's more fanciful Persepolis). War may be hell, but moments of grace and beauty shine through, best exemplified by Roni Dayag’s recollection of a late-night swim away from the scene of a beachfront battle. Decades later, he still remembers the soothing peacefulness of the water. These reminiscences nudge Folman's repressed memories back to the surface, culminating in a horrific massacre to which he bore witness. Arguably, he didn't need to include actual footage of the deceased when stylized graphics get the point across fine. If Waltz with Bashir isn't a documentary in the conventional sense, it doesn't resemble most animated efforts either. What matters more is the harrowing narrative he constructs from out of the minds of these haunted men. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Stills from Waltz With Bashir (click for larger image)

Customer Reviews

A New Kind of Documentary
"Waltz with Bashir"

A New Kind of Documentary

Amos Lassen

Israel's entry in the Oscar race gives a new definition of the genre of documentary film. The idea of an animated documentary may seem to be paradoxical to some but this may be a whole new way to present an idea. Basically, the film rakes place in a bar, an old friend tells "Bashir" director, Ari Folman, about a nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. The dream comes to him every night and the two men decide that there is a connection between the dream and their connection to an army mission during the war on Lebanon in the early 80's. Ari surprises his friend and himself when he realizes that he cannot remember anything about that period in his life. They decide to interview old friends and comrades all over the world in order to find out what really happened during that time and as Ari goes deeper into the matter and the mystery, his memory begins to return with surreal thoughts and images.
"Bashir" is a very disturbing look at war and its consequences on people and nations. It compares the atrocities of the Lebanon war to other wars as it mixes dream sequences with surrealism and real life events. The film thereby mixes reality with illusion. It is in your face and very powerful.
The event that is the center of the film is the massacre at Sabra and Shatila un which Palestinians were murdered by Christian Phalangists as revenge for the assassination of their leader, Bashir Gemayel. Although the Israelis did not participate, or perpetrate the killings, they did nothing to stop them. The animation in the film is seen over the recorded speech of actual participants in the '82 war.
Folman's journey of introspection begins with his lack of memory and it seems that all he and his fellow soldiers have left is their dreams. One of the former soldiers believes that the dream he has of the vicious dogs is subconscious punishment for his killing dogs on the mission. The film follows a stream of personal anecdotes and because much of these stories are dreams, Folman chose to tell them through animation with the exception of the final scene and this is the scene that gives justification for the film. Therefore the film has a feeling that is both evocative and down-to-earth. We see war as reprehensible and ugly and as the stuff that nightmares are made of. It is not about who won the war, who was right or who made mistakes. It is about how we, as people, react to war and how it affects people who are involved in it.
Primarily "Bashir" is about the trauma of conflict, memory and its repression but it is also about the specifics of Israel's role in the Lebanon war and about war in general as it is experienced by fighting men. It revels truth by taking the viewer back in time through the memories of people who witnessed it. It devastates as it reconstructs how and why innocent civilians were massacred because those with the power to stop what was going on did nothing. We do see that Israel is not without guilt in acts of passive genocide which goes against the Israeli response to what Hamas provokes.
From the very first frame of film the movie grabs the viewer and will not let him go even after the film is over. The movie cuts deeply by using images of youth and this brings what he says home. This is more than just a movie, it is a total experience that will probably change the views of many.

Sure-fire Oscar winner up-ended by the industry's "long-standing joke"
I'm compelled to write this review after watching the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Foreign Film selectors botch yet another award. David Ansen wrote in Newsweek last year about how the selection committee's decision-making, umm, 'process' is the industry's "long-standing joke." The right films don't even get nominated (Ansen's article centered on the egregious omissions last year of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and The Band's Visit). And the ultimate winner is often the ultimate head-scratcher: faced this year with two sure-fire classics - this film and the equally worthy French offering The Class (Entre les murs) [Theatrical Release] - the committee chose instead the little-known (and almost completely unseen) Japanese nominee Departures [Theatrical Release]. With all due respect to those filmmakers, you could hear the sense of bewilderment in the hall as the dazed winners (I suspect even they were dumbfounded) made their way to the stage. I'm sure that bewilderment was mixed with murmurs from an audience of insiders - something along the lines of "unbelievable, they've blown it again."

A shame because this film is among the best you'll ever see - it's writer/director Ari Folman's attempts to deal with his repressed memories of his role in the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres during the 1982 Lebanon War. Folman's innovative use of animation allows him to re-stage the memories of his fellow soldiers. At the film's end, Folman's role (or at least his proximity to the events) is revealed and animation segues into real-life footage of what transpired in the camps.

The Golden Globe committee - with a far more firmer grasp on common sense than the Academy - handed 'Waltz' its award for the best foreign language film of 2008.

Ansen's article from last year reveals the Academy's "attempt to reform a misbegotten system," and concludes that "Mark Johnson, chairman of the committee, has vowed further reforms. History suggests it's going to be an uphill battle."

Keep working at it, Mr. Johnson. This thing is still broken.

artful, sad, provocative and extremely relevant
Waltz with Bashir - film review.

This film carries itself on two levels, as entertainment, and as a documentary.

As far as the documentary goes, towards the end we get the final perspective of just what the Lebanon war was like. Eventually, Israeli soldiers are plainly described [by the narrator] as young drafted Nazis, marching into war as ordered--not to be mistaken for the murderous S.S. troopers, whose appearance is played by the Lebanese Christian militia (The Phalangists)--who commit the massacres against the Palestinian refugees. Yet it's the Israelis who barely react to their own consciences when they know what's wrong is wrong.

As an animated movie, it's a fantastic visual journey of vicious imagery and a puzzle that strategically unwinds to reveal itself. This is a story told through non-linear flashbacks and dreams sequences. Towards the end, the script seems to run out of steam and is replaced by pure documentary as the last parts of the story are told through witness interviews.

Waltz with Bashir is artful, sad, provocative and extremely relevant.