Waltz With Bashir 與巴席爾跳華爾滋

Because the things these men remembered slide so easily into dreams and fantasy, there's no more effective way to convey what we hear and see than through animation. Told with dynamic energy, these stories unnerve you in ways more conventional footage simply would not. A Lebanese family in a car is slaughtered only because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Israeli officer obsessively watches German pornography. A soldier and his machine gun waltz through a hail of bullets in front of a huge wall poster of Bashir.

If "Waltz With Bashir" has a recurring image, it comes out of Folman's unconscious, a surreal memory of himself emerging naked from the sea with a weapon in his hands while the beach is lit up with orange night flares.

"It should be hallucinatory but also realistic," the director explained to Sight & Sound magazine. "We wanted to make a realistic scene in a very dreamy way, so that you would be confused until the very end about whether it really happened."

That thought emphasizes that "Waltz With Bashir's" emphasis is always on the personal, not on the geopolitical rights and wrongs of Israeli actions, but on what individual soldiers experienced and what those experiences did to them. This emphasis persists even at the film's disturbing closing sequence, when animation gives way to live-action newsreel footage of the horrors perpetrated at those refugee camps. What happened was not a dream, "Waltz With Bashir" insists, it was real, and that was the most nightmarish thing of all.

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