Waltz with Bashir (2008)

Waltz with Bashir is one of the most beautiful movies about death I have ever seen: death to self, to country, to memory. The animation technique layers the characters, the scenery, the background players, so it's at once alive and surreal. It's also the first animated documentary I've ever seen.

I'm not entirely certainly I should be calling it a documentary (semi-documentary? auto-documentary? fact-based animated head trip?). Writer-director-star Ari Folman can't remember when he went to war in Lebanon back in 1982 at the age of 19. Well, that's not entirely true. He remembers swimming.

Folman looks up fellow soldiers, commanding officers, a reporter, and he gets bits and pieces of what he's long repressed: a solider who could only kill dogs, the scent of patchouli, a waltz with assassinated President Bahsir Gemayel. Some of them don't appreciate his digging things up. No one remembers the swim.

The movie comes back to it, over and over again, like a wave overtaking his memory every time he manages to build up something substantial. Folman's sure he went swimming during the Sabra and Shatila massacre even if no one else remembers it. Why can't he remember the massacre itself when he was only two hundred yards or less away, he asks his psychiatrist friend.

Your parents were in a concentration camp, weren't they?

Yes.

Well, there you have it.

When the final frames suddenly snap from animation into newsreel, it doesn't carry the shock it was meant to because the last exchange is too ponderous. What does that mean? It's presented as though Folman has experienced some sort of Holocaust of the mind: he can no sooner understand what his parents went through than he can imagine what happened to the Palestinians. So he went swimming. His mind's on a vacation. It took the conclusion with it. A-