Waltz With Bashir

we watched this last night in the mall theatre. we were the only people in the theatre, as always, and the mall for whatever reason always seems to snag a new independent film. the animation is terrific. visually, the movie is hard not to look at. it's about the war in Lebanon from the early eighties (i believe i've got the years right) and deals with a man's loss of memory twenty years later. he was in the war, he knows, but he can't remember what he did. there are many sort of typical "war movie" scenes, ie, when the men aren't fighting, they're partying on the beach with their guns. this is almost expected; it has to be there. it can't be horror the whole way through. still, the movie is mostly very original, even dealing with war. what's most interesting to me, however, are how the past scenes of war are woven in with a present time narrative of our main character trying to regain his memory. we learn, quite quickly, that he's repressing his memory. we begin to see his psychology, along with the psychology of many of the soldiers (now former soldiers) around him. this is what i was most impressed with by the film, it's meditation on the unstable nature of memory (nothing new) along with how that unstable nature is influenced by a person's psychological make-up. the animation, then, done in a dream-like and exaggerated manner, fits with the notion of an unstable past. the film is moving, hard to look at at times, even though it's animated, and makes a move toward the end which i saw coming but which was powerful enough anyway. there are other trailers and scenes out there.