Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #610 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-03-30
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 87 minutes

Synopsis
In this favourite from 2008's Cannes Film Festival, animation and documentary meld with critically acclaimed results. Director Ari Folman filmed a number of interviews about people's experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War, and then this live-action footage was turned into striking animation by a team of talented artists.

Customer Reviews

Stunning and beautiful
This is a trully unforgetable movie about an Israeli soldier trying to remember the events of a fateful day in Beirut during the 1982 invasion.

Without going into the histocracity of the movie I would like to say that is not meant to be taken an historical accoint but as a personal recollection of the events.

I was very impressed with the animation with several novelties that make it stanning to watch. The soundtrack has a mixture of actors and real interviews with Israeli soldiers as well .

The human side of the story ,the futility of war ,the human cost are all perfectly reflected in the movie which also has a very moving and engaging.

Some reviewers give it one stars and call it propaganda but I feel Mr Folman made it very clear that this is not a documentary or an impartial view this is HIS OWN experience put into a film. If anything portraits the Palestinians as vicitms and the Israeli soldiers in the same way as some Vietman films show American soldiers as they walk in a Vietnamesse village and get a bit trigger happy.

Ari Folman ( director ) gives an interview about the film as an extra on the DVD where he explains his reasons for making the movie and his views on the events described in the movie.

Impossible to forget
No matter the historical facts and finger pointing, I think the reviewer from the Guardian was spot on: ""Waltz With Bashir is an extraordinary, harrowing, provocative picture. We staggered out of the screening in a daze." This was exactly my experience. It took a good 15-20 minutes before my friend and I had processed what we had just experienced and were able to string together a sentence - deeper than "WOW"!

Very impressive
I quite like adult - orientated anime. There are things you can do with it that you can't do with film, at least not without tacky CGI which somehow looks even more unbeleivable. But for this, it added a kind of dreamlike quality which fitted the subject matter - a man confronting the part he played in what amounted to genocide - really well. I was a bit too young to appreciate what was going on in Lebanon in the eighties and if I'm being honest, after watching this movie I was only a tad wiser. I'm glad it wasn't dubbed. The Hebrew dialogue added to it's sense of authenticity. Something would have been lost if some production company decided it would be a greater commercial success if it was supposedly made more 'acceptable to a western audience'. I was not so keen on the animation style though. It looked like it had been done on a computer and the movements looked wooden and the overall effect was a bit nauseating. But this is a serious film about the journey of a broken soul to what you hope is redemption. I recommend it highly.