Waltz with Bashir

Watching Waltz with Bashir: A very good start to the year, and the second great animated movie I have seen this year.

I was drawn to seeing this movie by the poster above: it felt like a scene from Marine Drive in Mumbai. It is a documentary but, being an animation, it has no need for reconstructions of events which nobody filmed. Too much sepia, but the visuals are wonderful, the figures move stiffly but still do a great job of conveying emotion through body language, and the movie has a glorious soundtrack, and a very droll sense of humour.

I bombed Beirut, I bombed Sidon:



and Enola Gay

How distributed decision making typical of bureaucracies can help create atrocities by dispersing responsibility, how religions are only occasionally about what people believe, and how movies really are a multimedia art form.

Every single trailer in the theater felt like an advertisement for a computer game. The invention of photography forced painting to discover virtues other than realism, and the spread of the movies may have compelled novelists to discover qualities other than plot and scene. What will this new art do to old ones? We will have more movies which are made to go right into a computer game, but will we also see more works like Waltz with Bashir?