Waltz with Bashir

An animated documentary -- seemingly a contradiction in terms -- is receiving some of the best reviews of the year. Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, produced in Israel, tells of an Israeli man's tortured memories of his country's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It has elicted words like "riveting" (Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal), "astonishing ... searing ... altogether amazing" (A.O. Scott, the New York Times), "haunting" (Lou Lumenick, the New York Post), and "profoundly affecting," (Rick Groen, the Toronto Globe and Mail). Groen's review takes up the issue inherent in a movie that uses animation to replace bloody reality. "All war movies face the endemic problem of how to dramatize war without aestheticizing it. Here, by beginning with an obvious layer of added artifice, the animation technique openly admits to that problem and, paradoxically, goes some way toward solving it, simply by accentuating the notion that nothing about war seems real, yet everything about war is real -- deadly real." Indeed, Scott in the New York Times observes that at the end of the film, the animation stops "and the audience is confronted with graphic, horrifying images of real dead bodies. This ending shows just how far Mr. Folman is prepared to go, not in the service of shock for its own sake, but rather in his pursuit of clarity and truth."