In brief: Waltz With Bashir

A gorgeously-animated film that is bogged down by a visual pace that looks like everything is projected half speed, like the story is trying to chug forward through a tank of molasses.

It also gives no indication of what the film actually is if you're watching it without knowing beforehand. It presents no thesis. It turns out to be little more than a animated documentary with flashback re-enactments. The documentary devolves from something that seems like a narrative (about a man who, because of some form of PTSD, has blocked out all memory of a war) into a group of seemingly-random talking heads. It doesn't help that the interviewees are all middle-aged men who rarely stray from a droning monotone when rambling through their vignetted war stories.

Also, this film assumes prior knowledge of Israeli military operations in Beirut in the 80s and the ethnic complications surrounding it. I don't know anything about that war; I was lost most of the way through.