| | | A Lebanon War Story.
Features: Widescreen, Dolby Digital (5.1), English, Dubbed & Subtitled
One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there's a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. Ari is surprised that he can't remember a thing anymore about that period of his life. Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself. As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images.
"This psycho-thriller, a Golden Globe winner and presumptive favorite for the foreign-film Oscar, itself is revelatory." Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention." Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
"It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film." Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Waltz With Bashir is a supremely courageous act, not only as a piece of filmmaking, but much more so as a moral testament." Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor
Editor's Note
In reflecting upon his time spent in the Israeli army, filmmaker Ari Folman has produced WALTZ WITH BASHIR, a profoundly moving antiwar meditation that is equal parts personal memoir, history lesson, and animated fever dream. In 1982, Folman was a soldier during Israel's first invasion of Lebanon. This was a painful moment in history, when the newly elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, was killed in an explosion. Furious, his party, the Christian Phalangists, retaliated by storming into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacring thousands of innocent victims. Over 20 years later, Folman is disturbed to realize that he has no memory of this incident even though he was there at the time. In order to remember, he tracks down several of his friends and soldiers who were there with him to find out what really happened.WALTZ WITH BASHIR is as difficult to categorize as it is to forget. It is a truly startling achievement, a film that can be classified as animation and documentary and history and fiction. It is all of those things at once, and it is also much more than that. Folman uses a combination of Flash animation, 3D, and classic animation to bring his film to visual life, but it is the beautifully haunting score by acclaimed German composer Max Richter that provides the film with its heart and soul. As WALTZ WITH BASHIR unfolds in dreamlike waves, Folman understands that guilt is a dangerous thing, and war is even worse.
| Features | Audio Commentary with Director Ari Folman | | Audio: English DD-Plus 5.1 | | Audio: Hebrew Dolby Digital 5.1 | | Building the Scenes - Animatics | | Interactive Menus | | Q & A with Ari Folman | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English | | Surreal Soldiers: Making Waltz With Bashir | | This Is A Blu-Ray DVD Made For Blue-Laser Format Players Which Produce Higher Quality Picture & Sound |
| Entertainment Reviews
 | Waltz with Bashir - Blu-Ray DVD Review By: Josh Lasser - Blogcritics.org Reviews Published on: 6/30/2009 10:12 AM | | There are times when someone sits down to watch a film and after 90 minutes realize that they've been sitting there in stunned silence the entire time. Did they like it? Maybe, maybe not. Was it a good movie? Well, it was certainly a "good for you" movie. But was it fun, was it enjoyable? It was both technically impressive and entirely engrossing, but enjoyable, who knows. Perhaps, just perhaps, the person you're talking to just finished watching Waltz with Bashir. This 2008 release, which won a DGA award for Best Documentary, a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same category is certainly an experience....read the full review |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Sony Pictures |
| Release Date: 6/23/2009 |
| Running Time: 90 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 2008 | | Catalog ID: 30039 | | UPC: 00043396300392 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 1.78:1 |
| Cast & Crew | Roman Paul - Producer | | Max Richter - Composer | | Gerhard Meixner - Producer | | Yoni Goodman - Director of Animation | | Yael Nahlieli - Producer | | Serge Lalou - Producer | | Ari Folman - Screenwriter | | Ari Folman - Director |
| Awards |
Cannes Film Festival (2009) | | | Ari Folman, Nominee, Golden Palm | |
Golden Globe (2009) |  | Waltz With Bashir, Winner, Best Foreign Language Film | |
Oscar (2009) | | | Waltz With Bashir, Nominee, Best Foreign Language Film of the Year |
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| | Professional Reviews | Total Film
4 stars out of 5 -- "That Folman and his team storyboarded and redrew all the interviews from scratch, creating a style both hallucinogenic and reverential, turns it into something exceptional." 12/01/2008 p.54Empire
5 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he stark, high-contrast animation is the lifebreath of Folman's film...something gorgeously graphical and soaringly inventive." 12/01/2008 p.76 Los Angeles Times
"Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen." 12/25/2008 New York Times
"[A] memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film." 12/26/2008 Box Office
4 stars out of 5 -- "[Folman has] taken a documentary about his experiences as an Israeli Army conscript stationed in Lebanon during its civil war and turned it into a harrowing cartoon." 01/01/2009 p.48 Entertainment Weekly
Included in Entertainment Weekly's 2008 Films Of The Year -- "Ari Folman masters the hybrid form of an animated, autobiographical documentary -- and, in so doing, establishes a powerful new language for truth-telling." 12/26/2008 Rolling Stone
3.5 stars out of 4 -- "[The film] is hallucinatory brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of war....Get ready to be knocked for a loop." 01/22/2009 Entertainment Weekly
"[An] extraordinary and painfully timely autobiographical documentary of remembered life during wartime..." -- Grade: A 01/16/2009 USA Today
"WALTZ WITH BASHIR may be the year's most unusual animated film and also a deeply moving one....An innovatively conceived and poignant history lesson, unfolding as a kind of investigative documentary/mystery." 01/23/2009 Chicago Sun-Times
"WALTZ WITH BASHIR is a devastating animated film....The film is structured like a conventional documentary, with Folman visiting old army friends and piecing together what they saw and remember." 01/21/2009 Washington Post
"BASHIR is a thinking person's horror movie, about horror and horrifying echoes: The parallels between the Holocaust and the massacres are pronounced." 01/23/2009 Los Angeles Times 9 of 10
"Waltz With Bashir" is one of Israel's first animated features, and it's going to be a hard act to follow. Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. More than that, in its seamless mixing of the real and the surreal, the personal and the political, animation and live action, it's unlike any film you've seen, period..."Bashir" was written and directed by Ari Folman, one of Israel's top documentary filmmakers and one of the writers on the Israeli TV show that became HBO's "In Treatment." He's told interviewers he always envisioned this as an animated film, even though the process ended up taking five years, because "animation functions on the border between reality and the subconscious" and that's exactly where he wanted to be..."It should be hallucinatory but also realistic," the director explained to Sight & Sound magazine. "We wanted to make a realistic scene in a very dreamy way, so that you would be confused until the very end about whether it really happened."...That quote underscores that "Waltz With Bashir's" emphasis is always on the personal, not on the geopolitical rights and wrongs of Israeli actions, but on what individual soldiers experienced and what those experiences did to them. This emphasis persists even at the film's disturbing closing sequence, when animation gives way to live-action newsreel footage of the horrors perpetrated at those refugee camps. What happened was not a dream, "Waltz With Bashir" insists, it was real, and that was the most nightmarish thing of all. - Kenneth Turan
Rolling Stone 10 of 10
A potent and profound document of war and its aftermath done as a cartoon -- what's that all about? Watch and learn, cynics, even if you think animation is strictly for kung-fu pandas and you know squat about assassinated Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel. For what's on view in Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, submitted for Oscar consideration by Israel as both foreign-language film and animated feature, is hallucinatory brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of war...From the first haunting scene ? a combat survivor's recurring nightmare of 26 barking dogs he was forced to shoot to keep an element of surprise ? the movie grips you and won't let go. Folman cuts deep with images of his young self, of naked boys emerging from the sea to pull on uniforms, of a crazed soldier dancing with his rifle as he fires randomly at unseen snipers, and a final glimpse of devastating reality. Get ready to be knocked for a loop. - Peter Travers
Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
'Waltz With Bashir" is a devastating animated film that tries to reconstruct how and why thousands of innocent civilians were massacred because those with the power to stop them took no action. Why they did not act is hard to say. Did they not see? Not realize? Not draw fateful conclusions? In any event, at the film's end, the animation gives way to newsreel footage of the dead, whose death is inescapable...The film is structured like a conventional documentary, with Folman visiting old army friends and piecing together what they saw and remember. The freedom of animation allows him to visualize what they tell him -- even their nightmares. The title refers to an Israeli soldier losing it and firing all around himself on a street papered with posters of the just-assassinated Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel -- thus, waltzing with Bashir...The debate still continues about the inaction of the Allies in not bombing the rail lines leading to the death camps, although there were bombs to spare for bombing German civilians. Now "Waltz With Bashir" argues that Israel itself is not guiltless in acts of passive genocide, an argument underlined by the disproportionate Israeli response to the provocations of Hamas. We may be confronted here with a fundamental flaw in human nature. When he said "The buck stops here," Harry Truman was dreaming. The buck never stops. - Roger Ebert
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