An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Haunted conscience: Ari Folman combines hallucinatory dreamscapes, the horrors of hard truth and a natural beauty of expression as he dredges up forgotten memories of his experiences in the 1982 Lebanon war
Pawns in their game: young Israeli soldiers come under attack
If you think an animated documentary from Israel is not exactly a mouth-watering prospect, Ari Folman’s extraordinary film will prove you wrong. This is a work which even Pixar ought to study intently — it goes into areas where animation seldom dares to tread.
Folman was a conscript during the 1982 Lebanon war which was sullied by the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although it was the Christian Phalangist militiamen who carried out the atrocity, they were allowed into the camps by an Israeli army content to stand guard outside.
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli defence minister of the time, was informed of the danger of this but did nothing about it, and the killings remain a distinct wound to the nation’s self-image and international reputation.
Though this is discussed with some horror, it is not what Waltz With Bashir is principally about. It is more about Folman’s memories of being a soldier in the war and the way those memories seemed to have been expunged from his mind for some 20 years. He interviewed his friends, witnesses of the war and fellow soldiers to try to fill in the black hole in his past. Having done that, he had many of the film’s real characters painted in outline and animated. The result was always going to be risky but it is brilliantly successful.
One of the first scenes in the film has three young soldiers, one of them Folman, emerging naked and laughing from the sea near Beirut as flares light the sky, the palm trees and the tall, once-luxurious buildings of the city.
Another has yowling dogs pounding through Beirut like harbingers of death and destruction. A third depicts the devastation inflicted on the city, with dead and injured horses strewn like toys on the ground.
Folman’s dreamlike imagination also runs riot when his patrol is trapped in the walled city, with snipers taking pot shots at them from the windows and ledges of the houses above. You get a real feeling for what it must have been like fighting the war for young men, many of whom knew little or nothing of its political implications.
Folman’s portrayal of the soldiers’ leaders is pretty damning. A brigadier sits in a Lebanese château barking out orders as he watches a porn movie. The distinguished Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai rings Sharon to inform him of the massacre, only to be thanked for his trouble and wished a happy Jewish New Year.
Folman’s own recall of the killings unfolds on screen with his unit launching flares from the roof of a high-rise building, unknowingly providing the light that gives the Phalangists their chance to enter the camps. In the morning, Palestinian women run wailing by a roadblock as he watches, startled by what it all may mean.
If the animation weren’t so powerfully dramatic, even magical at times, Folman, an ordinary rather than an overtly political grunt, could never have swung all this and also included some humour and irony. His footage speaks for itself. It suggests a haunted conscience; Folman — the son of parents who survived Auschwitz — thinks this was why the memory of his time in the army were blanked out for so long.
What is astonishing is how vividly it has now been brought back to life and how it links with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this David Polonsky, the film’s chief illustrator, and Yoni Goodman, its head animator, deserve as much praise as Folman.
Painting each frame of Waltz With Bashir took almost four years and many doubted it could be done. But there is no question that the result is one of the most resonant films of its year from any source, and quite probably a landmark in animation.
It combines hallucinatory dreamscapes, the horrors of hard truth and a natural beauty of expression that has not often been matched before. Never mind that some in Israel thought it not radical enough.
This is a soldier’s story, not a polemic and, watching it, you see a view of the war that sticks in the memory not because it is a political diatribe but because it is an intensely human document that seeks to be true to one man’s view of what has come to be known as Israel’s Vietnam.
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