During the current moment being enjoyed by the animated documentary genre (Chicago 10, Persepolis), Waltz with Bashir will stand as a landmark triumph. Already the recipient of numerous awards, including six Israeli Academy Awards, and a likely winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the glowing buzz that precedes director Ari Folman's dark, hallucinatory memoir of a tour of duty during the Lebanese Civil War is justifiable.

The film is built around Folman's search for memories of his experience, at the age of 19, in the Israeli Army during the occupation of Beirut. It is there that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were massacred in an event that is the primary reference point in Folman's fleeting, troublesomely absent recollections. But most of Bashir is an episodic, chronologically jumbled collage, narrated by the fellow veterans he seeks out to interview about what they remember. The film's less historically fastidious than it is evocative of the tragic sameness of soldiers' daily lives in active combat; Folman's fellow soldiers' memories create a grotesque composite of etched trauma that includes child combatants, slaughtered innocents, and the restlessness of constant proximity to a deadly enemy.

The animation, jagged and brooding against a soundtrack of early '80s angst (in a good way) is a surprisingly effective mode of portrayal for the unwavering darkness of the material. A harsh, abrupt deviation from this style in the film's last minutes may be artistically controversial—but not to an extent worth disputing the profundity of the filmmaking that precedes it.

Heretofore a documentary filmmaker of more traditional means, Folman's use of painterly strokes to visualize the hindsight of Waltz's interviewees, including himself, is a strangely natural choice—not least for its ability to highlight the questionability in documentary works' representational veracity. Stylistically and thematically, Waltz with Bashir could scarcely be more relevant, and if you are new to—or dubious of—the marriage between animation and reality, this is where you'll find its ablest example.