Waltz with Bashir

Potent animated fragments of a haunting hangover from war. Were it not for its graceless dénouement, it could have been one of the festival's unqualified accomplishments.

The title refers to the film's vivid, spinal scene. A frustrated infantry soldier grabs a comrade's rifle and aims fire at the hidden snipers of Beirut, the sheer kinetic ferocity of his movement throwing him around like a wild dancer in abandon, as he pockmarks bullets into the monolithic portraits of the assassinated president-elect Bashir Gemayel that gild every building on the block. It is a moment of real coordinated consideration that comes to epitomise the piece in more than a titular way: music, imagery, choreography, all perfectly timed to perform a delirious burlesque centerpiece. It is also apt, in its grandiose theatricality, as a thesis statement for a film obsessively concerned with memory and imagination - and the elisions and slippages that occur between the two. The story begins with a pack of 26 baying hounds racing furiously through the cityscape of a combat survivor's nightmare. It is at once an arbitrary opening, which is never later expounded, and a jolty rendering of things to come; the circuitous traffic-flow of Folman's tour through deep-seated anxieties and fragmented testimonials that comprise this animated reckoning with his participation in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. For this isn't a film with just one issue at its core. In fact, it is resolutely guttural in its approach; an agitated series of conversations with comrades, interviews with diverse speakers, and tableaux vivants from the frontlines, that resist flow and easy articulation. Combining flash animation with two- and three-dimensional computer graphics, these documentary vignettes are dealt a surreal, beautiful-scary volatility that effectively partners Folman's jerky approach to narration. By night, Folman's palette is akin to an oil slick: patent blacks, agent oranges, beautiful chiaroscuro contrasts. Then, emerging from these brute-strong black lines, is a series of visual loops that will be nigh-on impossible to ever forget: reed-thin soldiers slowly surfacing from the sea, naked, rerobing by twilight on the beach; a stunning recital of Public Image Ltd's This Is Not a Love Song. These potent filmic reenactments of Folman's haunting hangover from the war are what make Waltz with Bashir. The result is like something that is relentlessly menacing us from the corner of our field of vision. When, eventually, this something comes into full view, it will floor you. The thus-far scattershot mise-en-scène coalesces into an appalling climax: the massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila at the hands of Lebanese Christian militants. Israeli complicity is confessed, but the elisions reappear. Memories, once more, cannot certainly be recalled. Ultimately, if it does not quite have the devastating emotional impact of Persepolis or Spirited Away - for me, the decade's twin benchmarks of intelligent animated film - it is because Waltz with Bashir is meant to be more of a crude gut-punch; unpleasant to experience, with no cathartic endgame to numb the pain. And it is a shame that after such admirable reluctance to concede his stylised dream vision, Folman settles on a cheap, heartstring-tugging trick of a coda - a cut to live-action documentary footage of the massacre's outcome - that is as graceless in its integration into the picture as it is thematically illogical. Without it, Waltz with Bashir could have been one of the festival's unqualified accomplishments.