Review of Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Ce G — 17 Jun 2010

A harrowing cinematic experience that will take your breath away in the first five minutes, and leave you chilled in it's final frames. Waltz with Bashir makes brilliant use of it's animation style to paint us a portrait of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and while it is ineffective at being very informative the film stands as a very important piece if only to enlighten a North American audience to an alien conflict.

Unlike Pixar's glossy images, the vividly stylized but imperfect look of Waltz with Bashir feels like an appropriately chosen language to tell the story in, rather than a aesthetic choice. It's the dreamy colourizations and impressive three dimensional artwork and camera movements inside it that express the director's feelings as he reflects on his personal experience in the war, and they are cinematic techniques that feel just as powerful as any of the conventional live-action ones we are more familiar with.

The screenplay smartly brushes the surface of a number of important historical aspects, but never gets bogged down in details that might distract the audience from the overall emotional impression that the filmmakers are hoping for.

And while the movie struggles to climax properly, and some of the pseu-documentary style interviews feel too slow, the film is not very largely effected by either of these problems.