Word: waltz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Film director Ari Folman is probably the only man in Israel whose cartoon image is better known than his real face. On the streets of Tel Aviv, Folman - a tall, grizzled figure - passes by unnoticed. But his animated self, as the protagonist in the film Waltz with Bashir, has seared itself onto the Israeli imagination...
...notion of Folman making a feature-length cartoon starring himself isn't as self-indulgent as it sounds. Waltz with Bashir isn't a whimsical WALL-E?style adventure or a cutesy Disney cartoon. Part documentary and part memoir, it details Folman's odyssey to retrieve the lost memories of his youth as a bewildered soldier under fire in Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war. Through flashbacks, visits to a psychiatrist and stories told by old war buddies, Folman's animated self follows his real-life quest to remember what happened. (See pictures from the best anime movies...
...Waltz with Bashir, which opened in the U.K. in mid-November and opens in the U.S. in December, has already found fans well beyond Israel's borders: it earned a Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes and will be in the running for Oscars next year. The film's images may seem simply drawn, and move at a sleepwalker's dreamy pace, but Folman uses them to capture war's surreal brutality. The title refers to a scene when an Israeli soldier, pinned down by sniper fire from the surrounding Beirut apartment blocks, leaps up and starts firing his heavy...
...Waltz is more than simply a war movie; it's about memory, lost and regained, and how the mind copes with horrible things. "My mother and father were both Holocaust survivors," Folman says. "My mom talks about it always. My father never does. We all have our own strategies for dealing with tragedy." His strategy for over 20 years was to bottle it up. "I'd never heard my own story. It never left my mouth...
...botched misadventure similar to America's war in Vietnam, and one nobody dared speak about afterwards. Folman posted notices on the Internet, asking veterans to come forward with their stories. He got over a hundred replies, and skillfully weaved into the film his ex-comrades' stories - and their nightmares. Waltz opens with a pack of snarling dogs racing through Tel Aviv's streets to converge outside an apartment belonging to a friend of Folman's. During the war, this friend's task was to shoot the watchdogs guarding the villages before Israeli troops carried out night raids, and for years...