Waltz With Bashir

I had assumed that the stupidest piece of behaviour at the cinema this year would be the family that brought a 3 year old to The Dark Knight, but no. That has been surpassed by the morons who brought a baby in to Waltz With Bashir. How? It's an 18 certificate! It might be animation but there's no cute talking animals here, only red-eyed savage dogs and dying horses. The format permits such nightmarish images to coexist alongside more surreal visions and "normal" life in a way that live action - even supplemented by CGI - couldn't. It's not glossy, smooth animation. That would be totally inappropriate. There's a feverish, hallucinatory feel: the repetition of the orange-hued scene of soldiers emerging from the sea; the murkey green of a soldier's reverie; the dislocation of Ari's furlough, his stasis distancing him from the everyday life that surrounds him. No straight documentary would be so effective, no matter how many reenactments were involved. Even towards the end, when animated talking heads begin proliferate, the interspersed memories keep it visually interesting while portraying the Sabra and Shatila massacres in a powerful non-exploitative manner. Nothing however can match the horror of the news footage that finishes the film. Grainy, fuzzy, difficult to decipher sometimes, but with the real victims in all their grief and suffering.