Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

Waltz with Bashir

Most animated features still rely on the cute critters of early Disney, but the form is pliable enough to contain a coming-of-age tale with a political sting, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Bashir really is different: a documentary cartoon about war's traumatic residue. Ari Folman, an Israeli doc filmmaker, learns of a vivid nightmare that one of his friends had: 26 wild dogs run through town and stop to bay accusingly at his window. Like Folman, the man was part of an army division that swept into Lebanon in 1982 and may have indirectly abetted the slaughter of Palestinian refugees by a Christian Phalangist force following the murder of their leader, Bashir Gemayel. Folman's investigation of that decades-old event and its impact on him and his friends was shot on video, then sparely, artfully animated by Yoni Goodman. The result is both realistic and hallucinatory. Bloodied bodies rise from the sea to haunt the dreams of middle-aged men, to accuse them of complicity, to roil their consciences. Bashir haunts the viewer too. This sensitive, unsparing film shows the lingering toxicity of war. 12/25

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