Anomalous animated film, autobiographical in nature. The premise has Israeli documentarist Ari Folman delving into his repressed memories of the Lebanon War twenty years earlier, in particular his role as a foot soldier in a massacre at a Palestinian refugee camp. Drawn in a “realistic” comic-strip style, Judge Parker as opposed to Dick Tracy, and set in motion in what we could call a viscid as opposed to a fluid style, the animation makes a useful investigative tool for a probe of memory, dream, imagination, well suited to conveying a sense of unreality, a sense of remoteness, well suited, in other words, to fictionalizing the facts, cerebrally processing the data. It also helps smooth over the familiar talking-heads pitfall, generating illustration where none exists. And it offers an easy solution to depicting the twenty-year age differences between past and present. The last-minute switch to live-action archive footage is hair-raising. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.