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Chopper Prophets

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Podcast

It was the fall of 2012. My wife and I were on a ride down to Encinitas, Ca. with some close...

VivaDecora - Decoração de Casa

Lifestyle and Utilities

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+100 mil fotos de decoração: casa, cozinha, quarto, sala e banheiro. Inspire-se! Encontre...

Red Stamp Cards

Lifestyle and Photo & Video

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Voted "Best Of the Web" by InStyle Magazine and featured in the New York Times, The Today Show,...

The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me

Lucy Robinson

5.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

Book

The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me by Lucy Robinson, author of A Passionate Love Affair with a...

Kirk Bage (1775 KP) rated Waltz With Bashir (2008) in Movies

Mar 11, 2021

Waltz With Bashir (2008)

2008 | Animation, Biography, Documentary

8.0

(1 Ratings)

Movie Rating

This is the fifth in the series of films I would recommend to an alien to explain humanity. Not, as posted on the Instagram account, #6 – sorry for the confusion, I think I skipped #4 on there when posting for Schindler’s List a few weeks ago. Anyway… today’s choice is Ari Folman’s extraordinary antiwar film from 2008, which combines several forms of animation and live action footage to create a dreamlike landscape of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and one man’s journey to reconstruct his own lost memories of events.

I saw this when working at The Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh on release. It was the kind of thing I loved to discover that I wouldn’t normally have paid to see. Its impact on me was immediate, and I went back to see it 3 more times. When it was released on DVD in 2009, it became my go to movie to gift to people who I knew would love it but may not have even heard of it, due to its low profile arthouse origins. It was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars, but otherwise went under the radar in many ways. I still doubt it has been seen by a quarter of the people who would immediately say it was one of the most amazing films they had ever seen.

The animation may seem gimmicky at first, but once you identify its utility in this context and understand this is not a film for children, it becomes a transcendent trip of vibrant colour, emotion and… humanity. I would call it as indispensable an antiwar movie as Apocalypse Now, and in many ways so much more moving than that classic. If you have yet to see it, do yourself a favour, pick a time you can reflect and allow the dreamlike quality to carry you away.