Melvil, I am so sorry that it has taken me so long to get to this write-up. I have no excuse.
Waltz with BashirOh boy, it's hard to write about this film, especially after such a long time! Ok then.... I was both pleasantly surprised and a little bewildered that the film's focus was one man's attempts to get to the bottom of his own involvement in the conflict, to explore the way his mind and his memory works or doesn't work in relation to the events he has witnessed. I didn't know very much about the war the film was talking about, so I struggled a little to keep up with and get involved in the subject matter that this documentary was talking about. At the same time, this felt as if I was 100% with the narrator on his path of discovery about himself and the events of the war.
At one point of the film, somebody reveals that he experienced long stretches of the war as if he was watching a film or playing a video-game (oh my, it has been so long that I watched the film that I can't remember exactly which it was!
). This happened about three quarters of the way through, and at this moment I realized that this was exactly what I was doing with the film: I was keeping myself at a distance, preventing myself from getting really wrapped up in the story, the tragedies and horros of the subject matter by focusing almost exclusively on the amazing visuals of the film. I had my finger on the screenshot button the whole way through, absolutely wowed by the animation, but I didn't connect with the film properly on an emotional level.
The very end of the film has caused a few debates (is it manipulative to replace the animation with real footage to drive home the message that this is actually a real stories, that these atrocities have really happened?), but to me it wasn't that big a deal. By the end, the film had enough of an impact on me that the additional gutter punch of the live footage wouldn't have been necessary, but I wasn't angry about its inclusion either.
In all, I can see why
Waltz With Bashir would be regarded as one of the best of the decade, and the visuals alone are reason enough to see it, but I think I must be missing something. I found it really clever and rewarding to approach the subject of war from the angle that this film did, i.e. posing questions about how memories work and how the mind deals with traumatic experiences, so ultimately I was really glad to have seen it, even though I didn't wholeheartedly love it. Thanks for the dictation, Melvil!