Waltz with Bashir

That "Sin City" sense of melancholy and art--art that takes pride in itself but doesn't obnoxiously shout to be looked at--opens Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir," a 2008 Israeli animated film. The film's main character, voiced by Folman, is chased by 26 dogs, haunting him in his nightmares. He must find out what is provoking these nightmares, and he learns eventually that his memory is filling in these gaps; his mind is making up a film. The film is thus his search for what exactly happened during his war memories in Lebanon.

This movie has a unique ability to juxtapose animated realism and absurdity without much conflict. This is a rare (I actually can't think of any others) animated film that is viewed and shot as a documentary. According to Yoni Goodman, the director of the animation, the interview process took about eighteen months, and the total production took about four years. Contrary to the animating process called rotoscoping of films like "Waking Life" where the live-action footage is traced over to create an animated visual, this movie utilized real movie which were then mapped out onto story boards, with traditional animation, minimal 3D camera usage, and some additional visual effects. You can read more about it here and here.

The result is a really fascinating animation to view. Darkness is punctuated by orange and brown, then dark yellow and sometimes snow white hues. There's a lot of unfilmable content that can be filmed this way, particularly the sea scene with the blue lady.

But hallucinatory and innovative animation aside, "Waltz with Bashir" doesn't really differentiate itself from other war films, with its dialogue of characters disillusioned and haunted from their war experiences. What I liked about the movie is the animation and its ability to present something new, but that was the only sense of novelty I felt from this picture. Its tales of alienation and disillusionment and confusion are stuff we have seen in many films, read in many books. There is no story driving this movie.

Even though the crisis between Israel and Lebanon should be remembered, this movie likely will not be.