It's a film that you'll stand up and applaud after watching it with your breath taken. It is completely beyond the original meaning of animation, beyond entertainment and fairy tales. Documentaries can use this form, cartoons can use this form, war themes can use this form, and the most important thing is that its crude painting style and delicate narrative will completely disappear when the real footage appears in the last tens of seconds. people beat.
I have seen many films reflecting on war. The most talked about "Apocalypse Now" is like a nightmare, and the most classic "Schindler's List" and similar "The Pianist" seem distant and even romantic because of a certain halo of memories. . My favorite "thin red line" also lacks realism. And this one, starting from the sequelae of modern war's destruction of individual spirits, recalled the battlefield full of unreal and absurd dreams. The ultimate place is actually the "Waltz" of the title. Who would have guessed that the "Waltz" under the title of this cartoon actually refers to the messy pace of the machine gunner shooting all around.
Rough black lines delineate the interviewee, simplifying reality, highlighting the lines on the characters' faces and the calm look of healing wounds. The battlefield in everyone’s memory is like a dream, real and illusory: the huge goddess swimming over from the sea, the gun muzzle and the boy under the mottled tree shadow, the golden city under the flare, the officer’s face in the command post who decides the life and death of civilians. The reflection in the upper pane, the war correspondent miraculously marching straight in the hail of bullets—everything is a fragment, deeply ingrained in the hearts of everyone involved. Monochromatic high saturation, thick black lines, two-dimensional realistic style but revealing a thorough sense of abstraction.
The soundtrack deserves a mention, not just for the actual "I Bombed Beirut", "This Is Not a Love Song" and "Good Morning, Lebanon", but also the classical piano against the backdrop of waltzes and woods sniping. The cheerful and cheap tune of the former sang such cynical lyrics, and the beautiful and elegant melody of the latter matched such a tragic scene—I couldn’t bear such a strong contrast, and my heart almost stopped.
When Israel sent troops to Lebanon in 1982, I never knew much about the origins of this strange chaos in the Middle East - I believe that the soldiers who were on the battlefield back then, the soldiers who are still on standby now, and the soldiers who will inevitably die in the future, do not understand either. . As if the world had been like this from the beginning, endlessly.
This is war.
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