Animated documentary unearths painful war stories

Published 7:09 am Friday, January 30, 2009

There’s no Oscar category, yet, for best animated documentary. There haven’t been many films that fit the description.

If there were an Oscar for this odd hybrid, it would surely go to “Waltz With Bashir,” a stunningly unusual new film from Israel.

In fact, “Bashir” has been nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar, but not for the animated or documentary categories.

The movie is the fever-dream of director Ari Folman, who wanted to make a documentary about his and his fellow soldiers’ memories of their military experiences in 1982. Although “nightmares” is more the word than memories.

The incident in question occurred when the numbingly habitual Middle East hostilities led to Israeli forces entering Lebanon, and the Christian militia known as the Phalangists massacred a group of Palestinian refugees in Beirut.

This was days after the new Christian president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, had been assassinated.

Although Israeli soldiers had not participated, the Israeli government later determined that its own military leaders had not done enough to try to stop the massacre. This incident haunts Folman and the other people he interviews in the film.

Because “Waltzing With Bashir” is animated, the memories (and present-day nightmares) of the former soldiers are brought to life on screen. They’d be called “re-enactments” if this film were live action.

But there’s something about the animation that draws you more deeply into Folman’s inquiry. Being dreamlike itself, the style also fits the genesis of the project: the bad dreams that were dogging Folman and the other former soldiers.

This approach also sets up the devastating final moments of the movie, which jolt the viewer out of this fascinating world and back into the real thing. That switch has been done before, but rarely as powerfully.

The film was completed and shown at film festivals many months ago (it won a brace of awards at Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars), but of course its release in the U.S., and the Oscar nomination, comes at a time when Israeli-Palestinian woes are once again aflame.

Which would seem to prove Folman’s point about the necessity of remembering, which this movie does very eloquently.