lucywalkercats This film takes animation to entirely new heights (and greater depth) as Ari Folman takes you back to the perspective of young Israelis entering 1980s war-ridden Beirut. The fact that this film is lauded by people on different political sides should speak to its power, its humanity, and its rawness. Highly recommended.

antoniodevincentis The first time I watched Waltz with Bashir I could not believe my eyes. I had never seen anything quite like that before. I had approached it aware that it was an animation about the endless troubles that have tormented the Middle East for decades. I learned that it actually is a documentary telling about a quite specific bit of the History of those people. A shockingly realistic documentary about memory as well. The personal memory becomes, perhaps, collective memory. So it might as well be said that the struggle of the individual trying to cast a light on the most shocking and frightening war memories of his could be read as a collective try to deal with the past of whole nations and communities in war-torn areas of the world. The whole work is a cry for peace, carried out with a very peculiar technique, an outstanding music score and scenes of unparalleled cinematic poetry. I will never grow tired of reccomending this movie to any adult.

chaos-rampant This is a film heavily about memory, about the filmmaker's memory of his part as an IDF draftee in the Lebanese War of '82, about, perhaps, a nation's collective memory of having had to escape all that and the hallucinative boundaries of 'truth'. It's the third of three consecutive films I saw in as many days, where Israeli filmmakers bring to cinematic life their traumatizing personal experience of war, the other two being Kippur and Lebanon.In a way, all good film is about memory. It may not be expressly the subject matter, or indeed the filmmaker's personal memory, as here, but the function of imagining, which is the same function as dreaming and remembering, wouldn't work unless we had deeply embedded images in ourselves and the ability to recall them before us. We do, unimaginably rich stores of images, dynamic, evolving in time as is memory.And it can be said, without being too fussy about it, that everything we see are reflections of images put before the mind, illusory in nature. This is not the same as being false, but we'll get to that. The conundrum? Explaining this unreality in words reduces, it's a clumsy burden. If the mind is like a mirror, it's like touching the spot on the mirror you want to show, smudged the moment you do. So great art to my mind, like meditation, is the effort to touch without touching, to draw transparent air between ourselves and images. This touching without touching also applies to viewing a film.So here we have a filmmaker on a journey of memory, not trying to unearth simply some obscure corner but the whole story of a past self, the story as a single image. It's a Citizen Kane of sorts, with the filmmaker in the role of 'reporter' visiting friends and acquaintances of old as he begins to fill the picture.It's flawed, in that what it explains point blank about memory and dissociation is slim stuff, notation instead of music. It obscures truths by intellectual analysis, as much so as Waking Life does with dreams. Thankfully, those moments are few and you can brush them aside with ease.What's really worth it here, is puzzling a bit about the nature of this. Oddly pitched as a documentary, but it's not. How could it be? It's about a dreaming self who twists images. Malleable reality before our eyes. What it is, wonderfully so, is a narrator 're-discovering' his story.So it's fitting to have it be animated, every image constructed, illusory. And how rich the illusion! Some of it obvious hallucination, some of it unreal impression, some of it absurdly real. Some of it from the point-of-view of others. Utterly evocative as a whole, especially the dance.He tethers all these images into his story, wonderful images. As he does, the mysterious image of boys emerging from sea acquires all these different shades of reality, gradually becoming more 'real' as they light up his night sky. It's a magical scene that recurs several times in the film.This is the 'truth' here, peeling away different layers to discover the original image. This image is the last we see, a shattering moment in the film. The rest of the story as only the vessel to having witnessed the moment, the softening of edges of truth as we swim there.So a bit of Zen to meditate upon. Who is that self who witnesses the scene of distraught women? I mean as you watch the film, what is he to you? Is he another character being recalled? Is he the narrator causing the story to be remembered years later? Is he the original self 'found' again, or not? You must study this.

Koundinya A documentary that is equivalent to the motion pictures like Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda, by its presentation of the inhuman massacre, the war and the fanaticism arising from the war.It was a bold, yet brilliant attempt by Ari Folman, to make a documentary of a war he was a part of, but has forgotten with passing years, just like everyone else. He, with the help of his friends, who too were enlisted for the attack on Lebanon, were in their late teens and were consumed by the zeal to kill at will. None of them remember the exact details of the war, but they help Ari complete the jigsaw puzzle of the war by recollecting their personal experiences.While the main plot deals with Ari Folman retracing his memory and the horror of battle every one of his fellow recruits had to endure, a sub, yet pivotal plot includes the inhuman massacre of Palestinian civilians. The assassination of the elected President triggers the massacre among his zealous acolytes and the Israeli forces, of which the filmmaker was a part of, are unaware of the genocide conducted by the Christian Phalangists.The documentary is animated except for the last few minutes of running time, that shows the archive footage of women crying in the midst of a razed refugee camp with dead bodies piled up all over the place.A 10/10, without the slightest hesitation.