Ari Folman’s film is an animated documentary that begins with one man’s nightmare - a pack of murderous dogs that are coming to get him - and ends with a real-life nightmare: the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. What we get in between is a remarkable film that is harrowing and haunting.

It’s not like any war film you have ever seen; but then Waltz with Bashir isn’t really about war per se, it’s about how young men deal with war. What fascinates Folman is not the usual tropes of battlegrounds, blood and bullets, but the swamp of the subconscious, wherein the landmines of memory are waiting to explode.

The film unfolds like a murder mystery - as told by an amnesiac detective stoned on pot. Folman tries to rediscover what he, as a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, did - or didn’t do - during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. His quest begins in a bar, one dark, rainy night, where his old friend from the war, Boaz, is telling him about his dog dream, one he’s been having for the past two years. They both agree that the dream is related to their times as young soldiers in Lebanon.

Later, that conversation with Boaz triggers a kind of hallucination in Folman, who sees himself on the night of the massacre, emerging naked from the sea by Beirut, walking ashore beneath a sky lit by flares. What does it all mean, he wonders?

Folman goes to visit his shrink, Ori Sivan, who tells him memory can play all sorts of tricks on a man, and that he needs to speak to fellow soldiers to find out what really happened. So off Ari goes on a journey of self-discovery, interviewing former soldiers.

My favourite encounter is the one he has in Holland with an old friend, Carmi Cnaa’n. Together they share a few joints - no wonder these guys have a problem with their memories! - and it’s here that Folman admits he can’t remember anything about that period of his life. As for what he was doing on the night of the massacre, “It’s not been stored in my system”. Later, he discovers that none of his friends has a clear picture of that night. But as Ari hears the stories of others - how one friend, Roni, survived by taking to the sea, and how Shmuel waltzed with a machine-gun during a sniper attack - his own memories start to resurface.

As you would expect from a film like this, we see the futility, cruelty and brutality of war; yet what fascinates Folman is not the loss of life, but the loss of memory. The wounds on display here are not physical but psychological: guilt, repression, amnesia and bad dreams are what these soldiers take home with them. Help is at hand, though. When, at the start of the film, Boaz tells him about his dog dream, Folman asks, why come to him? After all, he is only a film-maker? “Can’t film be therapeutic?” Boaz replies. This film is about the rescue of a memory. It’s Freud’s talking cure, but with pictures.

Folman’s journey into his own past, and that of others, brings a forgotten episode to life in a way a straightforward documentary never would have. I wish it had made a bigger space for the humdrum what-why-when of historical understanding. I know it’s not that type of film, but a few facts would have been helpful. There is no attempt, for example, to explain why the Israelis were in the Lebanon in the first place. Wouldn’t a young, frightened 19-year-old recruit ask that ques-tion? And I must confess that I was anxious about the use of animation to deal with something as sombre and deserving of seriousness as war. On the other hand, this is a film about the tricks and survival mechanisms of the mind and memory, so animation is totally appropriate.

The film’s art director and illustrator, David Polonsky, has done a remarkable job. He lulls the viewer into a landscape where reality is wonky and woozy. From mundane interviews, the film frequently goes off into wonderful flights of fantasy and surrealism: machineguns become guitars; a giant sexy woman swims up and carries Folman away.

There are moments - though very few of them - when the animation can’t help but sanitise the horrors of war. At one point, we see a dead Palestinian girl, her head of curly hair sticking out of a pile or rubble. If that was news footage, I suspect most of us would turn our eyes away. Then again, too much reality can stop audiences facing reality.

What’s most surprising about Waltz with Bashir is the way a film that is so critical of Israel has been so well received there - even by government officials. It not only shows the deadly indifference of Israeli commanders to the fate of Palestinians, but their indifference to their own men as well. In one scene, Ari is ordered to collect dead and wounded Israeli soldiers and “dump” them as if they were trash.

This is one of those rare films that leaves you feeling as if you’ve seen something you can take home and talk about - an amnesia film you won’t be able to forget.

18, 87 mins

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