Review of Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Kenneth L — 08 Aug 2010

This movie gets tons of points for style and uniqueness. For one thing, just in terms of genre, it is literally like nothing you've ever seen before: it's an animated documentary, which seems like an oxymoron.

It's based on the director's own life, with several other people's memories included as well. It's about the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war, in which the director served as an Israeli soldier, but of which he has few actual memories, having apparently suffered amnesia.

The way he went about making the film was to interview other former soldiers, write down what they said, turn it into a script that includes both normal documentary-style talking and dramatic reconstructions of what they are talking about, bring the people into a studio, film them telling their stories, film enactments of the dramatic reconstruction, make storyboards based on the filming, then develop computer animation based on the storyboards.

I am reasonably certain this has never been done before, so the movie automatically gets high points for originality. Then there's the fact that the animation, which kind of looks like that in A Scanner Darkly or the French film Renaissance, is stunning to look at, and allows the director to get away with all kinds of crazy shots that would be impossible in real life.

The story told by all of this is very intriguing on a scene-by-scene basis, if somewhat muddled and disjointed as a whole (but then, since the people's memories are all fuzzy at best, that's the way it kind of had to be).

I doubt many other people, if any, will ever make another film quite like this one, so you should see it if only for its utter originality.