“Waltz with Bashir” offered me a unique moviegoing experience. An animated documentary with a cutting anti-war message—how much more distinctive can a film get?

The movie, which recently came out on DVD, has received a lot of praise. It was nominated for an Oscar this year for best foreign film, was awarded a Golden Globe, and appeared on several critics’ top ten lists (The New Yorker called it “a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it”). It more than deserves all these honors.

The movie is an autobiographical journey, with director Ari Folman trying to retrieve lost memories of being present as a young soldier in 1982 near the Palestinian refugee camps where the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres that killed at least hundreds took place. He interviews his comrades and undergoes psychotherapy. Through the recovery of his experience in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Folman sheds light on the assault that Ariel Sharon directed and the slaughter in Sabra and Shatila that ensued.

“I was not interested in [the politics of the killings], because I thought I had nothing new to say,” Folman told Salon. “I was interested in the common soldier, his point of view, and in the chronology of massacre.”

The title comes from a surrealistic scene in the movie in which an Israeli soldier dances in front of a poster of Lebanese politician Bashir Gemayel while firing his machine gun. It was the assassination of Gemayel that triggered the butchery at Sabra and Shatila. Gemayel was allied with the Israelis, who were attempting to use him and his forces to help destroy the PLO in Lebanon. Since the movie was released last December/January, the Israeli attack on Gaza gave the movie an added resonance.

Interestingly, on the DVD of the film, Folman says that the Israeli government helped fund the movie, since it thought the film would help improve Israel’s image by showing that the Lebanese Phalangists carried out the massacres, not the Israeli army itself, as is assumed by many people. If the Israeli authorities really think that a movie that shows the Israeli army assisting in the murder of refugees (and committing the other atrocities shown) will help redeem the reputation of Israel, they must be deluded.

Some have attacked the movie for not making Folman and his buddies more directly accountable for Sabra and Shatila.

“I didn't take responsibility as an Israeli, in the film, for what happened,” responds Folman. “And frankly, I didn't feel responsible. I was a soldier; we were clueless. We didn't know what was happening until it ended.”

The film took four years to complete. Folman and his team first recorded the interviews and recreated the other live footage used. Then, this was painstakingly redone in the animation format, with each drawing being a composite of several parts. And, finally, other technological augmentations, such as 3-D, were added in. After the visuals were complemented with an amazingly eerie score, the result was a movie like perhaps no other.

On the DVD, Folman says that if he managed to turn even one youngster away from war, he would have succeeded in his purpose. He contended that the problem with a lot of Hollywood anti-war films is that due to their suave protagonists, they make war look cool, and he consciously set out to avoid that.

He succeeded. If you’re a politically conscious cinema buff, you can’t ask for a better movie.