The dogs are after Boaz, 26 of them all counted, barking and snapping under vengeful, glaring eyes. Night after night they run through his dreams in a pack, gathering below the window of his flat to stare and snarl at the former soldier who killed them years before.
The nightmares of Boaz, an Israeli advancing into middle age, are the trigger for Waltz with Bashir, a highly unusual animated documentary investigating Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon through the memories (and memory loss) of the soldiers sent into the country to battle armed Palestinian refugee groups.
Boaz was a rifleman then, shooting the dogs before they could warn the local villagers of intruders. He speaks of his nightmare to fellow veteran Ari Folman, who happens to be the director of Waltz with Bashir. Folman wonders about how little he remembers from those times. He also has a recurring, disturbing dream of bodies floating near a beach. Seeking out the soldier who appears in that dream, Folman and the fellow veteran piece together a plausible account of Israel's strike against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
Given the recent action in Gaza, Waltz with Bashir couldn't be more timely. The animated format grants Folman distance from the trauma he recounts while heightening his story's imaginative power. The simple animation contrasts motion and stasis in different color schemes and strokes depending on whose memory is being shown. Images appear of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister and defense minister in 1982, enjoying breakfast while passing orders down to the soldiers in the field.
As Folman and his comrades peel back the fragile onion skin of memory, one of the blackest chapters in recent Middle East conflicts comes to light: the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians, including the elderly and children, by Israel's Lebanese allies, the Catholic Phalangist militia. By the climax of Waltz with Bashir, Folman comes to the discomfiting conclusion that elements of Israel's government and military were complicit in a mass murder comparable to episodes from the Holocaust.
