A LOT of animated works had the pretention to deal with war, promising to deliver THE TRUTH about what war is, how people feels about it and should. However, too few of them actually succeed. The biggest offenders, under the “anti-war” clothing, actually does better at glorifying it. By choosing the pilot as archetype, it glamorize it.
As I have said, too few animated works managed to give people a taste of what war is and does, and how it affect people. Grave of the Fireflies is one of them. Waltz with Bashir is another of them. “Them” being the few.
The story start with a man telling his friend Ari about a recurring nightmare: 26 dogs running and meeting under a window, to claim the life of the one who killed them.
Much to his surprise, Ari realizes that his own memories of his service in Lebanon are vague, if not fading. He engages on a journey across the world to meet his former comrades and to try to remember what during the 1980s, where he was and what he did at that time, in the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
The story is told in a documentary format, with interviews of Ari’s former comrades, and conversations with a reporter and a psychologist. And this works well with the format, much better than expected. While the abode flash-powered animation felt unnatural at time, it managed to give a good, if not realistic, body language to the interviewed people. Something about the cutout style animation gives a dream-like feeling to some of war scenes, like that car chased by the Isreali Forces, or the plane bombing the tanks.
Ari does more than exposing the war as it is, and showing figures that are not heroic, it shows how time and people can twist or erase the most grave memories, like those from a war. A natural occurence but dangerous. Even with the dream-like flavor given to Ari and the veterans’ memories of war, the director hit the viewers in the guts in the end by switching from an animated documentary format to live footage of the aftermath of the massacre. Because even if genuine memories became dreams or nightmares over the years, they takes root in the past, a past that is more real than the veterans wants to admit.
There is no grand speech about how war sucks or how there is no good and bad side or whatever a war was just or not. There are the horror of the corpses, a reminder of the ironic twist of the History pointed out in the movie: sons of the Holocaust ended up doing what the persecutors of their parents and grandparents did.
This, my friends, is one of the ways to tell about war in animated format.
Tags: Anime
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