Is It Better To Shoot Or Pray?

Waltz With Bashir
2008, dir. Ari Folman. 1 hour 27 minutes

There are four Academy Awards for full length movies (Best Picture, Best Animated Film, Best Foreign Film, and Best Documentary Film), and to the best of my knowledge, Waltz With Bashir is the first film eligible for all four.

Waltz With Bashir is a documentary about Israel's war with Lebanon and a particular massacre that occurred there in the 1980s. It is comprised of interviews with actual fellow combatants of director Folman, which were then rotoscoped (I think) into an animated style to match the animated re-enactments of their experiences, thoughts, dreams, and night mares. The animation allows the film to take on a type of hyper-reality, even in some of the interview scenes, which are really no different than had they been simply shot as real footage. At the very end of the film, at an important point in Folman's quest for information about his past, the film switches over to graphic real footage, to show the audience that these events were not cartoons at all, but very very real.

Like The Class, Waltz With Bashir is also nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and I think it will probably win. Highly recommended, though at times very graphic.

4 stars

Seen at the Bytowne Sunday night with Steph.