Waltz with Bashir uses animation to portray fragmented memoriesThis year at the Cannes Film festival an animated documentary about the massacre in the Middle East is in the lead to win the Palme d’Or prize. Director Ari Folman attempts to tell the story of the atrocity he bore witness to during his time spent in the Israeli army in 1982. According to the BBC the story is about:

The invasion of Lebanon, codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee, was an attempt to occupy the country as far as the capital Beirut.

It ended in what many think of as the worst atrocity of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, when at least 800 Palestinian civilians were massacred at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during Israel’s invasion.

They were murdered by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel while the Israeli forces encircled the camps.

Folman was among them. His film is a personal journey with his own narration accompanied, unusually, by animated images.

The director says he had blanked the massacre from his memory until he started making the film.

“I think more than ever that I was used. We were all used - cynically used,” he says.

‘Rage and anger’

“You are 18 years old, they send you there, you go there on a plane. You land at the international airport in Beirut and you see people get killed for nothing.

“When you look at it now, the rage and the anger is even stronger than it used to be before I made the film.

“Maybe that’s because I established family in the last five years and I have suddenly three kids. I look at them and they’re boys and think: ‘I will never let them do the same things I did.’
 
“This film is one of the things in order to persuade them not to take part in any violence whatsoever.”

  

  

Using classic animation combined with 3D, the film has a surreal quality - not least in its several dream sequences.

It has struck a chord with critics at Cannes, where it has been described as “vivid”, “politically combustible” and “peculiarly potent”.

While this is a tragic story of terrible events, I think, it demonstrates once again how animation can be just as relevant in story telling as live action when used correctly.