Interview. Ari Folman.

"Waltz With Bashir is a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, Waltz is by no means the world's only animated documentary, a phrase that sounds at first like a cinematic oxymoron. Movies like Richard Linklater's Waking Life and Brett Morgen's Chicago 10 have used animation to make reality seem more vivid and more strange, producing odd and fascinating experiments. But Mr Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power."

David D'Arcy talks with Folman about what makes an animated film vital long after its technical wow-effect wears off.

Updated through 12/29.

"Although it can be highly explicit in detailing war's horror, Waltz with Bashir is mainly concerned with the recollection of trauma," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Linking the slaughter of the Palestinians to the experience of Folman's parents in Auschwitz, the filmmaker's analyst-friend points out that 'the massacre has been with you since you were six.' In its final convulsive minutes, Waltz with Bashir goes to graphic news footage—breaking the subjective spell with the full, awful weight of TV images that constitute collective memory."

"Memory is always an unreliable witness, which is why this plunge down the PTSD rabbit hole needed to be animated," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "It's the only medium that can do Folman's excavations justice, exposing both his repressed recollections and the collective denial of a nation. The coup of the film is that by the time clarity hits - tellingly, via actual, real-life images - the shame has become everyone's: Israel's, Folman's, yours, mine. Even before that revelation, however, Waltz with Bashir has already left an imprint. It is, in a word, unforgettable."

"How does one avoid overly aestheticizing violence when using animation?" asks Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. "By its very design, the new film by Ari Folman... invites serious questions of representation, not least because the narrative is told from behind thick layers of computer-generated cartoon imagery. That Folman, working ostensibly within the narrative boundaries of documentary, manages to circumvent nearly every one of these ideological and aesthetic concerns testifies to his intelligence, compassion, and sophistication as an artist."

"Thoughtful, wrenching, and uniquely beautiful, Waltz with Bashir more than lives up to the hype that's been building since its Cannes debut in May," writes Chris Wisniewski for indieWIRE.

"Move over, Romania," advises Darrell Hartman in Interview. "Israel is the new breakout national force in world cinema."

Waltz "plays out as one of the most profoundly explosive animated documentaries I have ever seen, and is clearly one of the best pictures of the year," declares Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"Like the pack of wolves bearing down during the opening credits, the pressure is on to be impressed with Waltz with Bashir," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine, "not just for its visual flair but its openly critical view of Israeli foreign policy. Folman's belated exposé of atrocities committed in a Palestinian refugee camp may be politically correct, but it's also banal."

"The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique," finds Tasha Robinson at the AV Club, "is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people."

More talks with Folman: Steve Erickson (Film & Video), Andrew O'Hehir (Salon) and Ella Taylor (LA Weekly).

Online listening tip. Folman is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Earlier: Reviews from New York.

Updates, 12/29: "[D]espite some lively moments of absurdist whimsy (the titular sequence in which a shell-shocked soldier pauses in a dangerous no-man's land, firing off random rounds from his Uzi, shuffling around in odd dance-like bursts), the sharp, inky animation which both distances the viewer from the horrific war-time events and creates its own moments of unexpected beauty and Folman's shrewd understanding of the way in which memory (fails to) operate, Bashir comes off more as sketch than completed project," writes Andrew Schenker.

Folman "has made a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Call it an adult psycho-documentary combat cartoon and you're halfway there.... You could argue that the film has no business forging such beauty out of savage facts. What comfort is it to the relatives of the Sabra and Shatila victims, you might ask, that a few conscripts who stood by and did nothing are now free to articulate, and even to lyricize, their internal pain? My suspicion is that Folman is all too aware of that charge."

"Some filmmakers use images of slaughtered women and children for cheap shocks; others are more scrupulous, but so literal-minded that our defenses fly up," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't—to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream."

Susan King talks with Folman for the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at December 26, 2008 9:35 AM