Waltz with Bashir: Ari Folman

So here's a seemingly impossible question: can a movie act as cultural catharsis? Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981) was a fiction, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) a recreation, but Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (2008)? It is neither, both, and more. An animated documentary, the film is a stunning, visceral meditation on the nature of memory, warfare, and the lengths the human mind will go to protect itself from trauma. It contains scenes that would have been impossible (or irresponsible) to recreate in live-action: a pack of undead dogs hunting the soldier that murdered them during a military operation, a man laying on the stomach of an impossible large woman in the middle of a sea, a partially insane soldier literally dancing with his weapon in the middle of a live sniper zone, fireballs of yellow arching slowly 'cross the sky of a war-torn city. Making this documentary animated was a bold choice. And indeed, by animating it the entire film becomes a reconstructive facsimile, much like images and events which emerge and rearrange themselves from the depths of human memory.

10/10