A striking moment occurred to me yesterday when I was watching something beautiful and imaginative on the screen. The image does not escape me yet. It has lingered on ever since. It was the image of the eyes of a dying horse and of the tiny flies hovering over it. Death was waiting to embrace the animal and flies to eclipse the eyes, but he was still breathing on. His eyes were dozing off never to open again.
There were other some very touching moment through the 2 hour long film called “Waltz With Bashir”. I am sure many of you have seen this film and agree to what I am about to say. This film takes you through the broken images of the lost memory of a war soldier in Israel. Although the film revolves around this character but the theme is essentially war. What is most striking about the film is the freshness of the story and psychological element around it. It depicts brutality of the war yet avoids direct narrative. Hence the overall effect is quite sublime and profound.
This is animation at its best. You cannot make out the fine line between the real and the surreal and the film travels between these two genres very effortlessly. You hardly notice the shift. Sometimes you are transported to the war scene with guns and flares, and interspersed between these are dreamlike experiences owing the complex nature of human mind and how it reacts to warlike situations. There are also some very interesting almost scientific insights into the minds of humans especially during trauma and war.
The film is very brisk in the narrative but never hurries on to you. It pauses to ponder when it should doesn’t drag on when it shouldn’t. The film gets over in under 100 minutes and ends up telling a whole lot of things about life, war, people and crime, mostly through those striking images. It is an irony that whatever you can achieve with animation can hardly ever been imagined other genres yet there are very few experiments in animation in most of the big film industries. Agreed that you see a lot of animation work but most of it carries a stereotype of big entertainment value rather than serious and solemn cinema. If the success of the cinema is measured by how much it moves you and whether is it able to give you something which is unique in nature and very distinctive observation about life then this film has be of a great value to the world of cinema and viewers.
