Ari Folman’s latest film, the seemingly auto-biographical, animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, opens with a pack of 26 slavering, snarling, savage dogs charging down a street. With their teeth gleaming and eyes glowing, the dogs stop for nothing and no-one, but are clearly on the hunt. Coupled with a threatening beat and strategically rapid, disorienting cuts, this opening sequence instantly and grippingly engages the spectator mid-narrative, producing a feeling of unease, disquiet and nausea. Whilst the sense of shock and unsettlement is softened by the realisation that we are privy only to the recurring dream of an Israeli soldier who served during the first Lebanon War in 1982, in its first few minutes Waltz with Bashir effectively produces what will become a consistent sentiment of discomfort that fits closely with the film’s intended subject matter: the everyday lived experience of war.

In a sense the story is simple. This opening scene, or the retelling of it by the dreamer to the filmmaker, also named Ari, at a bar, works as a catalyst that alerts Ari to the fact that he himself, also a soldier during the war, has no real recollection of his own experiences. That is, as his psychologist will later tell him, he has unconsciously blocked it from his memory. And so the film becomes a quest to piece together the fragments of memory belonging to the others in the hope of retrieving his own.

This strategy of creating a temporally fluid narrative, that jumps from past to present, and from teller to teller, combined with the creative freedom that comes with the animated form, allows Waltz with Bashir to interweave themes of trauma and memory without relying on the trappings of a fact/fiction dichotomy. Rather, the film, whose ageing characters were in their twenties during the war, gives very little factual historical detail about the events that took place between Israel and Lebanon. It takes instead an almost magic realist approach, combining the factual and the fictional in a way that can only be done through the removal of the possibility of an ‘official history’ when thinking and talking about individual experiences of the past. This notion is confirmed as each of Ari’s different encounters and interviews contributes to a different and sometimes conflicting perspective of their roles and of what took place. Nothing is certain, time has aged them and memories are fleeting. Similarly, some of the stories seem so incredible that even the amnesic Ari remains dubious. The film’s very title alludes to this sense of the magical in a reality tainted with fear, suffering and despair. The subtlety and skill of the film in dealing with these themes adheres to much work being done in and around film and literary studies in relation to memory and trauma theory, the impossibility of representation.

Similarly, whilst it does not trivialise the severity of the war, it is effective in communicating the mundane nature of being a young Israeli in the army, a commentary on the impact of the everyday experience of war as lived by Israeli youth. From sunbaking on a jeep to the sense of ennui that comes from just waiting, the film effectively demonstrates the humanity of soldiers, not as heroes nor as killers, but as conscripted youths, who have girlfriends and families and dreams. The displacement of reality, the fact of being at war, inevitably affects the soldiers: a moment of pleasure, indulgence or stupidity, such as destructive joyriding in a tank through enemy territory, only granted at the potential expense of being bombarded off-guard. Human life loses its value: the enemy becomes nothing more than a target, a can in a shooting game between boys, civilians become regrettable casualties of careless errors and children become soldiers in an adults’ war. This constant juxtaposition between the vivacious naivety of youth and a more serious, if not melancholic, wisdom of aging, reinforces the role of memory as central for this displacement of the ‘objective’ account. The nostalgia for youthful minds and agile bodies becomes a manufactured product of these hash-smoking, middle-aged figures of the present.

Importantly, what becomes obvious in this sense of displacement is a deeper, more universal question, that of the role of the individual in war. As Ari comes to learn of the events he had attempted to dispel from his memory, so too the film becomes a reflection and a warning of another type of forgetting. Parallels can easily be made between the film’s emotional climax, which focuses on the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut, and the persecution and genocide suffered by the Jewish people forty years earlier. Similarly, the film’s concern with the lack of conviction or personal responsibility, bred through the promotion of homogeneity of a military culture, echoes the individual testimonies recalled time and again since the end of the Shoah.

In this sense, the film necessarily needs to be considered within a more contemporary context. As a transnational production – a collaboration between Israel, France and Germany – such an attempt to expose these ruptures could be read as paradoxically nationally cathartic, rather than as anti-nation. A sense of responsibility, of needing to tell, even with the impossibility of representation, works to interweave different national histories into a transnational one. France’s role as colonial oppressor has contributed much to the historical suffering of Lebanon. Germany’s reflection on its own past atrocities and attempt to ‘remember’ so as not to forget has become arguably part of the identity of a new-generation of Germans. Finally, made two years after the bombing of Lebanon that started war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, in the shadow of the intense presence that the Israeli military force has in relation to Israeli/Palestinian politics, the film begs for a reflection on both the struggle and suffering that has shaped the identity of Israel, as well as the continuing contradictions and ironies that seemingly work to contribute to the concept of Israel as a nation.