by Ari Folman and David Polonsky, 177 pages
A friend's dream about vengeful dogs triggers a surviving Israeli
soldier's search for the truth of what happened during his service in the war
with Lebanon and his memories of the massacre of Palestinian civilians his mind
has sealed off to protect him.
This story is powerful and I'm sure the animated film from which
this graphic novel is adapted is harrowing and visually arresting; but static
as it is here, one aspect of the artwork kept me from investing in the story and characters
as much as I'd have liked. Largely consisting
of altered photography from the war, the images have built-in realism that
works great for backgrounds (crumbling buildings, burning tanks, low-flying
fighter planes) but clashes with the way the creators chose to portray the modern-day
characters (their remembered younger selves look more drawn and less photo-like). Their designs look like
drawn-and-air-brushed-over photographs that have been enlarged or shrunken or
flipped to fit the needs of the various panels and then pasted on top of the
more realistic backgrounds. They almost
never alter the expressions, so pages are filled with the same flat, lifeless faces
over and over again, cutting the characters off emotionally and visually from
their deep, painful conversations and the terrible events around them. This could be intentional, to show how
they've distanced themselves from the trauma and are just going through the
motions, but I mostly found it distracting, lazy-looking, and a drain on the
emotional umpf. Some of the other
imagery, though, is haunting and the story's questions about memory and trauma
and guilt are important ones. If only
those few bland, frozen faces were different!
I'd say watch the film, instead, but only if you're prepared to be
presented with frames of harsh reality, as I assume it does as this book and
ends with a handful of unaltered photographs of the massacre's victims. I was not ready and had to shut my eyes and
close the book.
