This movie that its creator, Ari Folman, calls an animated documentary, is nominated for an Academy Award, but not in the animation or documentary categories, but as foreign-language film. Folman is an Israeli who, spurred by a conversation with a friend, realizes that he’s almost completely forgotten the details of his service in the military during the country’s 1982 war with Lebanon. Interviews with men he knew on the battlefield are the basis for the film.
Animation frees Folman to use “footage” and “camera angles” that would not otherwise be available. (The animation, partly based on live footage, utilizes a realistic, but simplified, style). Flashbacks, dream sequences, and the creative use of music, too, make this seem more like a narrative film, although it’s organized around interview segments (mostly using the actual voices of Folman’s old comrades). Folman provides few details about his life before or after the war, and no geopolitical details about the war. It is possible to see the movie as anti-Israel, I suppose, in that Israelis are shown killing civilians. However, the clear point is that such atrocities are the natural by-product of war and the fear and confusion that it produces. The director is Everyman.
Even while realizing that Folman’s choices were deliberate, for me they made the film a little too abstract. Some sequences are quite striking, like the one in which a solider is separated from his unit and has to swim to avoid running into his enemy. But it if a movie is not going to provide a storyline in terms of why the war was being fought, then it should have given a more significant one in terms of its central character.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/1/09
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