Cyrus Confronts the Dark Side Reviewing the "Waltz with Bashir" Blu-Ray

Sometimes you know watching a movie that you’re not in the right place in your life to watch it. “Waltz with Bashir” is one of those movies for me. It’s not that I can’t appreciate that it’s a major and distinctive work, spectacularly innovative in its animation style or even that it has some disturbing and important things to say about war. It’s just that I’m personally ignorant as hell about the events of the Lebanese Civil War of which the film speaks. I felt like I was coming in halfway through a lecture, like the dummy everybody in class points and laughs at for not knowing about it already. Now that I’ve looked up more about this awful conflict, it’s become all too clear to me…I am the dummy who deserves to be pointed and laughed at. What can I do? History class was never my strong suit. Which was why I was doomed to repeat it, I guess. Managed to get by with a “C”.

Please forgive me for being the ugly American here, completely oblivious of major events in the rest of the world. If it wasn’t for foreign films I think I’d have no idea what it’s like living even outside of Austin. “Waltz with Bashir” presents a VERY foreign world to me, one where people allow such horrible things to happen that their own brains refuse to acknowledge that they ever happened. However, this isn’t a typical war film. It’s about the perception of war and how it changes in retrospect more so than war itself.

Ari lives in Israel and has realized something disturbing. After talking to a friend from his days in the Israeli army who is experiencing reoccurring nightmares about the Lebanese Civil War in 1982, Ari realizes he remembers nothing about his own wartime experiences. That night he has a surreal dream about the night of the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre but one that poses more questions than it provides answers. He seeks out a psychologist friend who advises him to look for other people he was in Beirut with at the time and find out what they remember in the hopes of stirring his own memories. What follows is a series of interviews that reveal many upsetting and bizarre things, realities mixed with hallucinations and dreams that lead eventually to a confrontation with the truth of what happened there on that horrible day and why Ari won’t let himself remember.

There are so many haunting images and scenarios in “Waltz with Bashir” that the entire experience of watching it becomes somewhat dreamlike itself. You float with the characters through the haze of indistinct memories in a state of calm and passive observance until....until...knowing that the Israeli troops stood by and let the Lebanese Forces massacre Palestinian and Lebanese citizens in a bout of carnage is bad enough…animated it’s tough, but the film switches to video footage towards the end and suddenly and shockingly, anything dreamlike about the experience is all too over. “Waltz with Bashir” won’t let it’s audience hide from the truth any more than it’s main character. This was real, this was apocalyptic, this was humanity at it’s absolute worst. One can’t help but think of the Holocaust (which the film certainly intended) and the irony is not pleasant. How do we make peace with this, the atrocities that even our allies our capable of letting happen, that even we let happen? Who are the bad guys anymore and what do you do when you realize it might be you? It’s not surprising that Ari couldn’t remember. I’d block this out too.

If I’m not talking enough about the animation, I apologize because it merits high praise indeed. “Bashir” is perfectly suited to tell it’s tale in this fashion. The style is unique, similar in appearance at points to rotoscoping, but a completely different process, sort of an extremely high tech 3-d version of Flash animation. Let me tell ya, it looks AMAZING in HD. The oranges and blacks in particular, which dominate one particularly memorable series of memories and dreams, really pop like crazy. The characters and the way the camera's point of view expresses their three dimensions is strangely static yet all too realistic at the same time, like watching a paper doll suddenly expand into our world. It’s hard to describe without seeing it. Suffice it to say, it’s all just so gorgeous that you could even watch this without subtitles or sound and still be drawn into its unique vision.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

-Commentary by director Ari Folman
-Surreal Soldiers: Making “Waltz with Bashir”
-Q&A with Ari Folman
-Building the Scenes: Animatics

All of the special features add up to two things: This is something new and exciting going on in animation and that this guy Ari HAD to make this movie. I still don’t understand exactly what happened over in Beirut in 1982, why it happened, or what the historical repercussions have been since. What I do understand because of watching this, is how easy it is for us to forget or gloss over the darkest sides of ourselves. I grok better than ever that we can look at another human and because they think differently than us, we can divide them off into a sub group not worthy of the same consideration as ourselves and our friends. I totally get that if we don’t watch ourselves we can become the bad guy and not even know it. As was taught in those history classes that I arrogantly doodled pictures of "Space Ghost" through when I should have been paying attention, the story of humanity is this film, over and over again. Can’t we do better? Shouldn't we all be paying more attention? No wonder the aliens haven’t shown up yet. Dammit people, that's my ride you're scaring off there!*

Click Here to Buy Waltz with Bashir [Blu-ray]