Filmmaker Ari Folman. (Steve Carty/CBC)

This story originally appeared during the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

If last year’s Persepolis was a landmark in animation’s coming of age, Waltz with Bashir, screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, confirms its status as a truly adult art form. Ari Folman’s powerful documentary/memoir of young Israeli soldiers in 1980s Beirut makes eloquent use of rotoscope-style animation to paint a visceral, hallucinatory vision of war on a par with classics like The Thin Red Line and Apocalypse Now.

Potential investors balked at Folman’s idea of turning the war in Lebanon into a cartoon. It was at the Hot Docs showcase in Toronto that the idea behind Waltz with Bashir finally took off.

For Folman, an Israeli filmmaker with two previous, non-animated features to his credit, there was no question that his personal account of the 1982 Lebanon War had to be depicted with drawings rather than real footage.

“There was no decision to make,” says the Haifa-born writer-director during a morning interview in a Toronto hotel room. “With animation, I have freedom to do whatever I like to do. I can go from action to the subconscious, to dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, [the effects of] drugs. I can jump from one dimension to another. I can imagine whatever I like. I’m a free soul.”

Waltz with Bashir’s animation, overseen by Yoni Goodman and drawn primarily by art director David Polonsky, may indeed be the best way to capture the surreal experiences of Folman and his fellow recruits during their posting in Beirut. Take the episode that inspired the film’s title. It’s a scene that perfectly evokes the out-of-body madness of war, in which a soldier leaps impulsively into the middle of an urban firefight, Uzi blazing. As he dances about gracefully, rattling off cartridges, a poster of Lebanese Christian leader Bashir Gemayel looms on a wall behind him.

These and other images emerge as the middle-aged Folman embarks on a quest to dredge up the repressed memories of his service in Beirut. Visiting with fellow veterans, a psychotherapist and a famed Israeli war correspondent (Ron Ben-Yishai), he slowly pieces together that troubling time and its sickening climax – the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. That tragedy, in which Lebanon’s Christian phalangists, enraged at the assassination of Gemayel, entered the camps and slaughtered their Muslim occupants, remains one of the most shameful atrocities in recent Middle East history. Not least for Israelis, whose occupying army stood by and allowed the killing to happen.

Folman, a lean 46-year-old with a steel-grey beard and soft blue eyes, says the film’s origins go back half a dozen years. At the time, he was serving in Israel’s reserve army as a screenwriter and wanted a discharge. To get out, he was required to visit a therapist, whose probing unlocked Folman’s war memories. “I realized I’d never heard this story I was telling before,” he says. “I’d never discussed it or thought about it. I started to talk about it with my best friend and then I realized that other people were like me.”

Although not an animator himself, Folman had used animated segments in his documentary TV series The Material that Love Is Made of as a way of enlivening standard talking-head interviews. To make his first fully animated film, he began by shooting real-life video of his interview subjects in a studio. The video served as a template for animation director Goodman and his team. While the interview sections recall the rotoscope style of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, the flashbacks to Lebanon achieve an eerie, dream-like lyricism, even as they move from the soldiers’ idyllic downtime on the seacoast to the terror and carnage of combat. Imagine Terrence Malick with a paintbox instead of a camera.

Not surprisingly, potential investors balked at Folman’s idea of turning the war in Lebanon – and especially the Sabra and Shatila tragedy – into a cartoon. It was in Toronto, at the Hot Docs documentary showcase, that Waltz with Bashir finally took off.

A scene from Ari Folman's film Waltz with Bashir. (TIFF)

“This is where the film started, actually,” Folman says. “I only had $80,000 [to make it], so we pitched it at Hot Docs in 2005 to try and raise more money.” Two international co-producers signed on to the project, allowing the picture – which had a final budget of $2 million – to be made.

The investment has already begun to pay off in critical accolades – Waltz with Bashir was a hit at this year’s Cannes festival – and box-office success in Israel, where it has been running for three months. Folman almost sounds disappointed when he says the film hasn’t caused any controversy in his own country. “The only criticism I got was from the left side of the political spectrum,” he says. “They said that the film didn’t take enough personal and national blame for what happened in the camps.”

As Folman had suspected, though, it touched a nerve with many fellow army vets. “Since it was released, I have no private life,” he moans comically. “I’m invited to a wedding, I go to a party, I end up sitting in the corner and people who I’ve never seen before are telling me all their war stories. They say they never discussed it with anybody else, and now they must tell me. And I tell them, ‘Listen, you should do a movie of your story,’” he adds with a laugh.

In fact, at one point during Waltz with Bashir, eyewitness journalist Ben-Yishai compares what he saw in West Beirut with photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto. The film even seems to allude to the concentration camps in the thin, undernourished appearance of the Israeli soldiers.

“People see more in the film than I intended,” Folman says with a shrug. “I was really skinny and all the other guys [were] as well. I never thought about it.” The Holocaust parallel is something Western audiences find more unsettling than Israelis, he adds. “Whenever I travel with the film, I’m always asked about it. In Israel, I was never asked about it. For [Israelis], it is so natural to see that parallel in everything; it’s in our DNA.” At the time of the tragedy, thousands of Israelis took to the streets in protest and a government inquiry led to the resignation of then-defence minister Ariel Sharon.

“Why do you think there was such a huge, outraged response?” Folman says. “Because the pictures that came out of the camps immediately [reminded] the Israeli public, consciously or unconsciously, of the Holocaust. For us, it’s no big deal, because it’s there all the time.”

Waltz with Bashir may be an international breakthrough for Folman, whose films, although award winners in his homeland, are little known outside Israel. Certainly, it marks a turning point is his style. He says more than half of his next film will be animated. “Animation started out as a solution for me and I fell in love with it,” he says.

What will that next movie be? Folman has optioned the rights to The Futurological Congress, a sci-fi novel by Solaris author Stanislaw Lem. “It’s a very wild book,” Folman says with a mischievous smile, “and the film is going to be wilder.”

Waltz with Bashir opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Dec. 26.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.