Waltz With Bashir

2008
Directed and Written By: Ari Folman

This was nominated for Best Foreign Film by the Academy last year. It's an animated film about one man's journey to try to remember his time in the Lebanon War. It's in the style of documentary realism. It's in Hebrew.

Just so you know, this kind of movie is totally my thing. As a documentary film student, I get way into really interesting ways of portraying personal history/memory. It makes me want to have a pretentious discussion with a bunch of other pretentious film students. I love animation used in creative ways, and as the director/writer asserts in the special features--animation can be much more real than live action. It's amazing that it was animated from scratch--no rotoscoping here, even though it looks like it. The movements and expressions of the people are so real...so awesome. Performative, animated documentaries are some of my favorites--so this was really effective.

It lost me a bit toward the end--probably because during the first half of watching it, I was on Adderall, and the second half, I was not. BUT--the very end is amazingly brilliant, so if you hate it, see it through!!!

Man, this was a really eloquent blog post...NOT.

B+