Graphic novels such as Maus and Palestine have shown us that there is, despite modernist assertions to the contrary, a way to effectively represent the unrepresentable. We should not be surprised that animation, the freeist and freakiest of all the lively visual arts, has followed suit.
Ari Folman’s award-winning cartoon documentary – or car-doc as boffins are calling it – belongs to a small but lovely sub-genre that includes the splendid Persepolis; the animated Middle Eastern diary. Waltz With Bashir recounts with stark, brutal honesty the writer-director’s own efforts to remember a youthful stint in the Israeli army, a tour of duty made fuzzy by selective amnesia and post-traumatic stress disorder. His frequently feverish fragmented recollections slowly form a travelogue through war, youth, memory, genocide and killer ‘80s tunes (Cake’s ‘I Bombed Korea Today’) that is as harrowing as it is dazzling.
The historical trigger for this brilliantly original project proves grim even by the standards of recent Israeli history. Folman and his unit, we soon learn, were witnesses to the aftermath of massacres at Sabra and Shatila when Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen slaughtered thousands of Palestinians while Israeli troops stood by.
Folman cannot but shamefully draw parallels with another 20th century genocide in which he lost many family members. His horror seems to infect the entire film, a sickness of heart and body politic that art director David Polonsky skilfully represents in black and jaundice yellow.
Folman’s parting shot – an angry, guilty lob at the world, at Ariel Sharon, at himself – is Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ without the artifice.