Waltz With Bashir

Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz With Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature.

Folman, whose magic-realist youth film Saint Clara was one of the outstanding Israeli films of the 1990s, has created a grim, deeply personal phantasmagoria around the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Waltz With Bashir is named for Bashir Gemayel, the charismatic hero of the Christian militias that allied themselves with Israel. It’s an illustrated oral history, based on a series of interviews Folman conducted with former comrades that mixes dreams with incomplete or conflicting recollections.

Waltz With Bashir opens with a pack of slavering dogs rampaging through nocturnal Tel Aviv — the dramatization of a recurring nightmare experienced by one of Folman’s friends. One dream triggers another: Folman, who claims to have forgotten everything about his wartime experiences, has his sleep disturbed by a vision of soldiers, naked save for their dog tags and Uzis, drifting zombielike out of the ocean onto Beirut’s posh hotel strip. That which has been repressed returns with startling ferocity.

Although explicit in detailing war’s horror, Waltz With Bashir is mainly concerned with the recollection of trauma. There’s a therapeutic aspect to the project, which isn’t surprising — Folman is one of the creators of the enormously popular Israeli TV show that inspired HBO’s psychoanalytic drama In Treatment.

Fear merges with megalomania. A tank rolls into a Lebanese city, casually crushing parked cars and backing up into buildings. When the commander is shot, the soldiers abandon their weapons and flee in total panic. One former soldier recalls his terror-induced vision of a beautiful giantess who rose out of the sea and allowed him to float away nestled on her body as the transport boat was incinerated. Experience is scarcely less fantastic: The sole survivor of an ambush crouched for hours behind a rock until, under cover of darkness, he swam south and washed ashore, only to be found by the regiment that had abandoned him.

Abetted by Max Richter’s ominous martial score, Waltz With Bashir matches a grim sense of estrangement with a distinctively alienated look. The thick-lined, near-monochromatic animation is frequently bathed in an eerie yellow light. Folman has said his documentary, five years in the making, was always intended to be an animated feature — the first ever made in Israel. The interviews were staged and videotaped, with the animators basing their drawings on the video material.

Waltz With Bashir takes ambivalence as a formal principle. Lebanon 1982 not only merges with present-day Israel but also with an earlier generation’s memories of World War II. The war’s hallucinatory aspect is heightened by the home front’s surreal proximity to the battlefield, both in Tel Aviv and Beirut where Israeli soldiers take sniper fire as civilians watch from hotel terraces.

Folman’s unresolved guilt is at once personal and socially symptomatic — an internal Israeli issue. Waltz With Bashir inexorably builds to the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, an atrocity that the Israeli army tacitly enabled but didn’t commit.

In its final convulsive minutes, Waltz With Bashir abruptly goes to graphic news footage — breaking the subjective spell with the full, awful weight of TV images that constitute collective memory.