I just saw Waltz with Bashir, a fantastic animated documentary chronicling Ari Folman’s journey as he tries to regain his lost memories from the 1982 Lebanon War. The direction is fantastic and the story is powerful and shocking and definitely blew me away.

The Wikipedia entry goes a lot more into the details of the movie’s plot and lists it mile-long list of awards. Also check out the Israeli Art Director David Polonsky’s interview here as well as the the trailer of the movie here.

What I really found interesting is that all the Character animation was done in Flash! Yeah the same platform that powers all those crazy banner ads, apps like Tweetdeck, crazy creative Flash websites etc etc. The Flash animation is combined with some really good CGI and occasionally cell animation to end up telling a deep and powerful story that, according to Ari, could not have been told in any other medium.

The breadth of the platform continues to amaze me and its something we occasionally forget. Fantastic stuff !