Waltz with Bashir

Tonight I truly realized the power of animated documentaries. The way Folman portrayed everything from the flashbacks to the dream of Folman’s friend was brilliant. Throughout the entire movie I felt like it being animated made it so much more powerful, and moving. The last several minutes of the movie switched to actual live action footage of the results of the massacre in a refugee camp. For me this took everything that the documentary had shown me and made it so much more real. I think mixing the two styles worked well with each other. The animations showed the flashbacks in great detail, which helped the viewers to understand the story in a depth which live-action could not have done – and honestly, it would have been too horrific for me personally to watch – but the short, raw footage of the refugees took that understanding and made it concrete

Before the scene turned from animation to life-action, the victims walking through an alley had faces frozen with terrorized expressions. They walked through the city, forever changed by the horrors they had lived. They would never be the same. This, combined with the live-action footage really helped me to understand the entire documentary. It was no longer an animated documentary, it was the lives and stories of so man humans.