My first festival film of 2008 was Waltz With Bashir (tiff) at the Ryerson. It was a beautifully animated story about the director’s attempts to remember everything about his experiences in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Conversations with friends, army colleagues and war footage were all transformed into this amazingly expressive animated world, and you were never entirely sure whether what you were seeing was meant to be real, or part of director Ari Folman’s imagination. Throughout the film, as he uncovered what was real, we were taken right along with him, right up to the jarring final scenes.

After the screening Folman was asked why he chose animation as the medium for this story. He said he could imagine it no other way, as it was a pastiche of memories both real and imagined, and anyway so little footage of that time existed. I couldn’t help but wonder what Air India 182 would have been like had they chosen this route? I think films like Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis prove that emotion can be conveyed in animation; it should be used more to describe this space between fact and imagination.

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[tags]tiff, tiff08, waltz with bashir[/tags]