Waltz with Bashir

The animation here is not rotoscope. Contrary to the common assumption, the team did not paint over live footage; Ari Folman and the Bridgit Folman Film Gang combined Flash animation, classical animation and 3D. The distinction matters, because the slightly wrong, sliding quality of the image is the subject: memory itself. Folman was a young soldier in the Israeli army in 1982, stationed with his unit on the edge of the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut. Years later he realises he remembers nothing of those days, so he tracks down the people who were there with him and gets them to talk. The film is an animation of those conversations. At the end the animation stops dead and real news footage arrives. The massacre is not drawn; it is shown. That transition is the whole argument: drawing carries you only so far, and after that there is only the record. Who it is for: viewers interested in what documentary can be, and in trauma described through form. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a political reckoning. The film looks out from one soldier's memory, that viewpoint is deliberately narrow, and the victims are barely heard.