I love this movie so much

Good movie but grossly overrated

best movie i've ever seen.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

OMW, where do I begin with how AWESOME this was? This is the first documentary style animated film I've seen, and I found it incredibly captivating, and even suspenseful at times. I thought the animation and music was great! This was also an interesting action adventure mystery, but nothing could prepare me for the heart wrenching ending. I absolutely loved this film!

'Waltz with Bashir' is an animated documentary written and directed by Ari Folman. The film follows Folman in his search for his lost memories from the time when he served in the Israeli army during the traumatic Lebanon War of 1982.The first thing that I realised while watching 'Waltz with Bashir' is the fact that the animation was absolutely indispensable and this film could never have been made in any other possible way. This is because although this is at the basic level a documentary, but Folman takes a lot of artistic liberty to recreate the real life events and these recreations would never have been possible without the medium of animation. So the animation actually enhances and assists Folman's storytelling instead of sticking out as a gimmick. Thanks to the meticulous animation and the visual attention to detail, the whole film looks gorgeous. Every still shot can be framed and laminated to admire the beauty that is on show. The surreal imagery of the animation will stay with me for a long, long time. Folman uses the animation to juxtapose the beauty of the visuals with the devastating nature of the events during the war that the visuals were capturing. There are multiple haunting images and shots which are devastating to watch like certain scenes in 'Schindler's List'.The screenplay for the film and the subject is deep and thematically rich. Although Folman never shies away from the heavy nature of the subject matter, but Folman's style keeps the film vibrant and energetic throughout. Even viewers who generally tend to avoid war films will find this engrossing.The primary themes running through the film are the loss of innocence and guilt. We see Folman interview other men who like him served in the Lebanon War. We see these men recall the horrors of war that they had to witness when they were just young boys pushed into this hellish environment. Pretty much all the stories and interviews are interconnected. All the stories underline the madness and the futility of war. The stories also establish the mental struggles that these war veterans have had to deal with after coming back. The singular element that connects these mental issues of most of these men is the element of guilt. The guilt of having to kill human beings and also the guilt of surviving the war when many of their colleagues couldn't. Water bodies like the ocean play an important and symbolic role in many of their stories. Folman uses this aforementioned theme of guilt very craftily and uses it to connect the issues concerning the nation of Israel as a whole in the political scenario with the personal issues troubling the individuals covered in this film.Another very relevant theme dealt with by Ari Folman is the dynamic nature of memories. He explores and establishes that someone's memories can be fabricated by others or by himself/herself. A person can choose to completely forget certain aspects of his/her life because of certain subconscious assumptions. 'Waltz with Bashir' is an artistic masterpiece. Its substance and style go hand in hand and complement each other instead of one submerging the other. It is a political film that is ambitious in its style and becomes more than just about politics and war. It becomes a transcendental work about human emotions.

One of the more brilliant films I have seen recently. It is the first animated documentary film I have seen and the montage is so effective that it made me wonder why is this not a more popular medium.The plot is kept gripping through the lens of the self-portrayal of the director who is searching for his lost memories of the war. It focuses on the psychology of the military men and the measures their minds resort to cope with the stress. The dealing of the actual massacre is not heavy handed and is approached in a balanced way, that leaves the audience with a burning desire to find out more about what transpired and how the collective failure of conscience of 3 groups of military men was brought about through systematic delegation.The auto-ethnographic angle helps focus on the non-political and a more humane angle of Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, which to me was the most novel aspect of the film that experiments with a lot of ideas of movie making and pushes the limits of cinema.Brilliantly pieced together with a comic-esque feel, Waltz with Bashir will stay in my head for the title sequence. A rash, callous and incomprehensibly inhuman act is described as a waltz. Accompanied with music that is befitting of the interpretation of the scene, it is among the best sequences in movies.

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.