Waltz with Bashir

Amazon.com recommended this for me after I purchased Persepolis a couple of months ago. And why not? Both movies are foreign language films that took place in war-torn parts of the Middle East in the 1980s, and both were animated with a graphic novel art style. The Internet seemed to be abuzz with acclaim for this one, so I ended up biting on Amazon's bait and buying Waltz with Bashir a little while back. Boy, am I glad I did. Waltz with Bashir is unlike anything else I've ever seen, and of course I mean that in a good way. The film is a semi-autobiographical documentary of sorts; filmmaker Ari Folman was part of the Israeli army that invaded Lebanon in 1982 and twenty years later, he's struggling to remember any details of the war itself or a gruesome massacre that he partially witnessed. So he goes off and interviews several of his old brothers-in-arms and through their accounts of the war he is able to fill in the gaps enough to recreate a pretty robust picture of what the war was like. These testimonials form the bulk of what is essentially a documentary film rendered entirely through Adobe Flash animation.

For a film that depicted a subject as gruesome as modern urban warfare, I have to say, this was stunningly beautiful. The animation was smooth and fluid and the comic book-style line drawings were sharp, crisp, and detailed. To provide an idea, here's a clip from about midway through the movie, depicting a montage of the initial invasion set to an original song made specifically for the film which, frankly, I absolutely love:

The film is quick but powerful, and beautiful but haunting. Its final minute or two consists simply of real life footage of the aftermath of the massacre, and this very real imagery of wailing mothers and piles of corpses serves to drive the point home that although what you've just seen was an animated feature, the events depicted in it were all too real.