Despite its blaring phantasmagoria and hallucinatory nostalgia, the central image of Ari Folman’s spellbinding Waltz with Bashir is of brilliant, serene calm. Bathed in street-lamp-yellow glow, three rail-thin soldiers emerge from a black ocean, stark naked, and begin walking ashore into West Beirut. Accompanied by the sustained synths and strings of Max Richter’s ominous score, the image replays throughout the film, eventually leading to a shattering finale.

At the beginning of Folman’s stylish hybrid of documentary, animation, and war story, this image of himself and his two comrades, youthful and morose, is all he can conjure up about his time as an Israeli soldier in 1982. He cannot remember what he did or what he didn’t do while serving in Lebanon against the Palestinians in the days leading up to the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Early on, Boaz, Folman’s good friend and fellow soldier, recalls a recurring nightmare he has about a battalion of zombie dogs running through the streets of a steel-blue Tel Aviv in search of his jugular. He knows the dream’s origins: As a soldier, he shot dogs in the small towns to ensure that they wouldn’t bark and give the Palestinians time to escape.

The rest of Waltz with Bashir plunges through Folman’s own past. He interviews a dozen or so of his fellow combatants, along with a psychologist friend and a television reporter who was on the ground during the attacks that led to Sabra and Shatila. The massacre, revealed in the film’s final quarter, served as retribution for the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Christian Phalangists and president of Lebanon.

Encased in a mixture of classic, Flash, and 3D animation, Waltz with Bashir is a film about disavowing violence in even the most feral of conflicts. Like the Israeli army, Folman never directly took part in the massacre but he allowed it to happen, lighting up the sky with flares to make sure the Phalangists weren’t murdering their own. His psychologist friend tells him he unwillingly took on the role of the Nazis, a fact that reaches back to Folman’s parents who were held in Auschwitz. The animation, supervised by Yoni Goodman and art director David Polonsky, liquefies Folman’s history of violence into a menagerie of surreal set pieces and dystopic paranoia.

But it is in the final moments, when the screen switches from Folman’s animated visage to televised documentation of the massacre aftermath, that the film’s complete weight moves to rest completely on the viewer. Like Folman’s disbelief of his own actions, the animation process allows the audience to exist in stasis, unprepared to witness the atrocities that came out of 1980s Israel, which might as well be current-day Israel. Even as a young Folman returns home on leave, to a girlfriend who left him and a youth already drunk on sex and punk rock, reality has become unrecognizable and he immediately yearns for the buried pain of the war. Fitted with Israeli rock ’n’ roll and PiL's This Is Not A Love Song, Waltz is a frothing pop nightmare, hypnotized both by wartime necrosis and the blunt trauma of repressed violence. Chris Cabin