Waltz With Bashir back

Did you know that Asaf and Tomer Hanuka were part of the animation team for the film? I certainly didn't.

More Sacco than Satrapi, this follows the writer's quest to regain his memory of the time he spent serving as an Israeli soldier in Lebanon in 1982. Jogged by a friend's nightmare of being hounded by a pack of thirty-six piss-eyed, slavering dogs, and haunted by his own impossible recollection of emerging naked at night with two other soldiers from the sea off Beirut, he tracks down other former colleagues who may hold the keys to what he's blocked out and why. What emerges is a series of confused and disorganised army manoeuvres carried out by terrified young men, leading up to the moment that Bashir Jumayer, President of Lebanon, is murdered. It was then that Bashir's devoted Christian militia exacted the most brutal of reprisals. With the Israeli army acting as cover both around and above the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, the militia marched in, rounded up the men, then massacred the women and children as well for good measure.

It is, as The New York Times wrote, "at once a furious act of conscience and lament" whose punchline comes in the form of a startling transfiguration. The animation style which precedes it, mixing heavily shadowed line-drawing and digitally coloured landscapes, results in an experience that's both unsettlingly surreal yet vividly, geographically specific. Nor are the pages the same simplistically reproduced frames so rigidly arranged in anime booklets: real thought has gone into their cropping and composition as part of a graphic novel.