Israeli filmmaker revisits his wartime experiences

By Peter Brunette

CANNES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Waltz With Bashir," a self-styled "animated documentary" from Israeli television director Ari Folman, adds its voice to the maelstrom that has swarmed through Middle Eastern politics for decades.

Festival programmers and television buyers should definitely have a look, but a theatrical release in other territories is a long shot. The film screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Disturbed by an old army buddy's recounting of a persistent nightmare in which he's being chased by 26 dogs, Folman determines that the nightmares are related to their service in the first Lebanon war in the early 1980s. Since the director seems to have repressed his own memories of that conflict, he sets out to interview old friends, psychotherapists and other veterans to help him regain what has been lost.

Nine in number, his sources speak of their own wartime experiences or attempt to interpret Folman's. The entire film is rendered in animation, a clever gesture that allows the director to restage horrifically violent encounters that otherwise would have cost millions to reproduce realistically.

For unknown reasons, however, and though he videotaped all the interviews, Folman decided to forgo the rotoscoping method used in Richard Linklater's "Waking Life," in which live-action footage is turned directly into strikingly lifelike animation.

Instead, Folman decided to have his team of illustrators redraw the scenes of the interviews, frame by frame, and to call upon their imaginations to render the wartime memories that are dredged up. The results are mixed.

Scenes of violence (or more frequently, scenes of scared Israeli soldiers in an alien, hostile land) often have a visceral, poetic power that could only come from a draftsman's imagination. The largely monochromatic palette Folman insists upon, however, works unfortunately in the opposite direction.

In addition, the method visually abstracts the scenes that haunt Folman and his former comrades, making them less emotionally immediate. Furthermore, during the interviews, the chosen style of animation leads to a distracting choppiness that renders the movements, gestures and facial expressions of the interviewees unconvincing. The other problem is that, memory naturally being something that returns in fits and starts, the film is rarely able to sustain any consistent narrative thrust.  Continued...