Where Is Anne Frank
Waltz with Bashir director Ari Folman retells the story of Anne Frank while connecting her plight to that of refugees in today's society, although sometimes the film gets tied in knots with its central magic realism device
On a stormy night in Amsterdam, the air crackles to life inside the Anne Frank Museum and the figure of a young girl emerges from the pages of that famous diary: Kitty (Ruby Stokes), the imaginary friend to whom Frank addressed all of her writing.
As Kitty reads through her friend’s recollections, Ari Folman’s film paints a full, vibrant portrait of who Anne Frank was – not just a tragic figure but a teenage girl who crushed hard on celebrities and got mad at her mother. In Kitty’s own half of the story, she wanders the streets of modern-day Amsterdam, striking up a romantic connection with a young pickpocket and learning about the legacy her friend left behind.
Magic realism has long been used as a way to give history a human feel and make sense of the senseless, and while Where is Anne Frank sometimes gets a little knotted up in the specifics of its magical devices, it still provides an imaginative way to retell a story so well worn that we risk losing our sense of its real meaning.
This is no doubt also why the film works so hard to connect the Frank family’s plight to the struggles of today’s refugees. At times, the ways in which it does so can feel a little didactic – something which isn’t helped by how oddly flat much of the dialogue and voice acting is – but there’s no denying the urgency of the film’s message or the earnestness of its conviction.
Released 12 Aug by Altitude; certificate PG