Waltz with Bashir is a rare beast: an animated documentary which got a Best Foreign-language Film nomination at the Oscars, on a particularly fraught political subject, namely massacres of civilians in the Lebanon War in 1982, which were facilitated by the compliance of the Israeli army.It's told from the Israeli perceptive, Folman playing himself as a veteran of the war, now trying to piece together the entirety of what transpired through interviews with other witnesses or participants. This angle helps to unshackle the story from the customary ball-and-chain accusations of anti-Israeli bias and the animation technique employed further wrenches the viewer from their comfort zone, where images of Middle Eastern conflict might otherwise have lost their impact through over-familiarity. The technique used here is not rotoscoping, as in A Scanner Darkly, but has a similar effect: it induces a sense of hyper-reality, and really plunges you into the midst of events.
If there's a critique to be made, it's that Folman doesn't ever get round to showing the Arab resistance or civilians in any other light than as unseen snipers or nameless victims, being wholly preoccupied with the invaders' agonised hand-wringing after the event. But it could also be argued that such an alienating dissociation between the abuser and the abused is part and parcel of the nature of modern wars.
7/10
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