Waltz with Bashir

If Vertigo is memory refusing to let go, this is memory refusing to come back.

In 2008 Ari Folman was in his forties, living in Tel Aviv, making documentaries. An old friend took him for a drink and described a dream he had every night: twenty-six dogs running down the street, stopping outside his window, staring at him. The friend said they were the dogs he had killed during the 1982 Lebanon War.

Folman listened, and then understood something: he remembered the name of that war, remembered being drafted, remembered being sent to Lebanon — and could not recall a single image. Not a blur. Nothing.

The weeks after Frost's Descent, with their short days, suit a film like this. Ninety minutes, animated, and not remotely for children.

他从一个朋友问到另一个朋友，从以色列问到荷兰、德国，问当年同一个连队的战友：1982 年 9 月的那几个晚上，我们在哪里，我们看到了什么，我们做了什么。

每个人的回答都不一样，而且几乎每个人都说自己记不清。有人说记得一片橙色的光。有人说记得海。有人记得自己在哭，却说不出为什么。有人记得一群女人在瓦砾里跑。有人记得自己整晚在开枪，但记不得朝谁开。

Folman 把这些碎片画下来。他不确定哪些是真的，于是干脆把「不确定」本身画成了画面：梦境、幻觉、别人的转述、自己伪造出来的回忆，全部用同一套笔触。这正是这部片子最狠的地方——它不给记忆分级，梦和证词看起来一模一样。

Start with the form, because the form is the argument.

It is not rotoscoping, though it is constantly described that way. The method Yoni Goodman developed at his studio in Israel combines Adobe Flash cut-out animation with traditional hand-drawn work: every drawing is cut into hundreds of separate pieces that move independently, and the illusion of motion comes from that partial movement. The pipeline ran backwards from normal animation — ninety minutes of live-action footage was shot first as reference, turned into storyboards and animatics, and then 2,300 key illustrations were drawn and composited. The film took four years.

Why animation at all? Folman's answer is blunt: memory is unreliable and constantly redrawn. Live-action footage claims to be a record. Animation never makes that claim; it admits from the first frame that it is a reconstruction.

It is that rare work accepted by both the animation and the documentary worlds at once: nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2008, where it premiered in competition; winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the first documentary to take that award; nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the first animated film ever nominated — while failing to land a Best Animated Feature nomination and losing documentary eligibility under the Academy's rules that year, which says a good deal about where it sits. It also won the César for Best Foreign Film, the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Picture, the Writers Guild award for documentary screenplay, the Directors Guild award, and the European Film Award for Best Composer, for Max Richter. Rotten Tomatoes 97%, Metacritic 91. In 2013 The Guardian named it the greatest animated film ever made.