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“Waltz With Bashir” is about Folman’s attempt to recover his lost memory of his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and in particular the Sabra and Shatilla slaughter of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps. Carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen, under Israeli protection and with its leaders’ complicity, it was one of the most notorious massacres of the 20th century. “Bashir” is an extraordinary work, whose hallucinatory animated imagery and unflinching moral honesty offer an intense depiction of the horrors of war and its devastating psychic consequences. A dreamlike combination of “Apocalypse Now” and “Maus,” it is at once the idiosyncratic story of one ex-soldier’s attempt to heal his hidden wounds and a damning indictment of the Israeli leaders who enabled the slaughter. In the end, by interviewing other soldiers, talking to a psychiatrist and sharing his anguish with friends, Folman succeeds in putting together a fragmentary picture of the terrible events he witnessed and had blocked out for so long. Whether he himself gains any catharsis from his quest is not clear, for at the very end of the film he abruptly abandons both his personal narrative and his animated technique and simply shows filmed images of the slaughtered Palestinians heaped up like cordwood in the alleys of the camps.
Be warned: Waltz With Bashir is not the kind of cartoon you see for entertainment. It’s heavy and difficult. It lays out the tragedy and horror of war through the lens of one man’s confused experiences. The feature-length animated documentary lives somewhere on the border between dream, reality, and a yellow-hued nightmare, and while it explores the horrors of war, it plunges deeper to feel out the damaged human psyche.
Many Americans—like me—are ignorant of the Lebanon War, the Israeli role, and the specific events surrounding the refugee massacre that followed in the early 1980s. This film not only provides a good historical perspective, but also grapples with the fallout in the lives of those who experienced the war, twenty years afterwards. Waltz With Bashir layers complexity into its subject—the good guys are not wearing white hats—and yet, it pulls no punches on exposing the atrocities, ugliness, and destruction of war. Fingers point in all directions. There’s a clear moral judgment about what is right and wrong, but the people involved don’t necessary fall into easy categories.