Waltz With Bashir Essay

In the film Waltz with Bashir, the main character Ari Folman, discovers he has no recollection of his time in the Israeli-Lebanese war. All he has left is a vision of himself and other soldiers bathing in water, while flair light up the sky. Ari embarks on a mission to seek out what really happened in the war. The story of his journey to remember the details of a horrific massacre that took place, is told through colorful and seemingly hallucinogenic animation. The story, as well as the way it is present, is meant to show that our brains have the nature to suppress horrifying and disturbing memories. As time goes on, these memories lay dormant in our subconscious. While ever present, they are hidden in the deepest parts of our minds. Eventually the memories return to Bashir. As soon as Bashir regains his memory, and learns of the horrors that took place,

This is seen in the fact that the final seen of the film is real life documentary footage. Rather than in cartoon form, the audience is subjected to real life violence. “There is no formal capitulation to routine verité, as some viewers have objected, in this plummet through a hyperbolic, computer-assisted imaginary to the analogue real; nothing pat about the 180-degree turn from show-stopping graphics to a straightforward graphic violence.” (Stewart 62) The return the reality of the situation is abrupt. One moment the screen is filled with cartoon images, the next we see real people suffering. Had the movie been a straight forward documentary, rather than animated, I believe it would have been tougher to accept the director’s point of view in film. If the audience had seen civilians dying through the film, rather than animated characters dancing and strumming their gun like a guitar, there would have been less sympathy for the main character’s plight. It is tough to connect with a character, while innocent people are being murdered