Massacres, murder, torture and genocide. It’s not exactly traditional cartoon fare, but then the Israeli feature animation Waltz with Bashir, which delves through these topics in punishing detail, is not a traditional cartoon. It is, in fact, a dreamy and often disturbing quasi-documentary that revisits the 1982 Lebanon war and asks difficult questions about Israel’s role in the infamous massacre of Palestinian civilians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. As such, it is part of a trend in animation that has turned its back on anthropomorphic heroes with happy feet and snappy one-liners, and boldly embraced a new world of adult subject matter.

Films such as last year’s Oscar-nominated Persepolis, a stinging parable set amid the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the violent Danish revenge thriller Princess (an 18 certificate in the UK), and the French dystopian sci-fi Renaissance are all animated movies that have somehow parlayed the medium’s traditional strengths (arresting imagery and unlimited imaginative scope) into entirely new forms. Inspired by the dark polemical rigour of graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust classic Maus, or the sheer propulsive energy of Japanese anime, the new cartoon champions are directing their attentions to the postteen audience.

“Animation is a perfect medium for telling serious stories, there’s no question about that,” says David Polonsky, 35, the art director of Waltz with Bashir. A former children’s book illustrator, who worked in Israeli Intelligence during his national service, Polonsky says that the vogue for adult feature animation is all a matter of timing. “There are plenty of precedents in short animation films, where they produce very mature work that bravely tackles serious issues. But what’s new with films like Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir is just the scale of the work – thanks to technological developments, it has now become a little simpler to produce a full-length animated feature.”

The “technological development” that Polonsky tapped for Bashir was Flash animation – a process that allowed him to bypass traditional frame-by-frame animation, and move great chunks of his own drawings within a computer. It took four years, he says. “But ten years ago this film would not have been possible.”

Polonsky adds that the marriage of Flash animation – which often gives movement a slow, surreal aspect – with the subject of Waltz with Bashir was entirely appropriate. For the film is essentially an exploration into the dreams, memories and mind of the writer-director and former Israeli soldier Ari Folman, whose own part in the Lebanon war forms the kernel of the movie. Here, concerned that he had no recollection of his role in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Folman set about interviewing friends, fellow soldiers and psychoanalysts in the hope of uncovering frozen memories.

The resulting interviews, all recorded on video, were transformed by Polonsky into animations, while the memories and reveries of those interviewed have become gorgeously eerie black and yellow portraits of war as Folman’s quest leads to both painful self-examination and a bitter indictment of the Israeli leadership.

“Some critics have said that it’s biased because Ari is only talking about his side,” says Polonsky, addressing a small storm of controversy that was whipped up in Israel during the film’s June release. “But really, I think this is the best he can do. He can’t talk for the Palestinians. As long as he’s truthful, and this film is truthful, I think that should be all that matters to anyone.”

EVACUATING THE INJURED

Slowly Folman’s memories return. He recalls his first night in the Lebanon war, ferrying dead and injured soldiers to a makeshift airport, in a dark, chaotic episode reminiscent of Apocalypse Now. “Maybe subconsciously I was thinking of Apocalypse Now for this scene,” Polonsky says. “Because it’s one of those scenes that has to be so much larger than life. The lights are much brighter than they would be in reality. It has to have that big operatic atmosphere. There’s a direct reference to Apocalypse Now later on, in a beach surfing scene, but it’s really always there in the background, never too far away.

“My inspirations didn’t come from comics or graphic novels, but from different sources, like German Expressionism. But no matter what you’re drawing, and how much fun it is, everything has to come back to the central issue of the massacre and the very real atrocities of war.”

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

During his quest for the truth about the deaths at Sabra and Shatila, Folman is ominously reminded of “the slaughterhouse”, a field in Beirut where Israel’s Christian allies, the Phalangists, tortured and dismembered their Palestinian captives. The field itself is depicted, with makeshift crosses and scurrying rats, as something straight out of Gothic horror. “When we talked with Ari [Folman] about visual ideas for this scene, his direction was to go for a B-movie feel,” says Polonsky. “And part of the thrill of working on the film was mixing up the genres and bringing in influences from surprising places, like horror. For me it was important not to get carried away with making pretty pictures and to keep it away from the realm of comics to avoid glamorising the images.”

FLOATING ON A GIANT SUCCUBUS

Folman’s army buddy Carmi Cna’an describes a dream in which he is saved from an exploding patrol boat by a huge naked woman, before floating away on her abdomen. “This type of scene is only possible in animation,” Polonsky says. “Here the soldier is looking for maternal protection.” He did not want to suggest the soldiers were innocents, “but when you look at them as individuals, this need for protection is true for everybody.”

THE HORSE’S EYEBALL

A psychologist recalls the testimony of an Israeli soldier who became immune to atrocities but collapsed when faced with a group of foetid, emaciated horses dying in Beirut. “Animals can be a way for people to look at war from a different perspective,” Polonsky says.

BEIRUT AIRPORT

“Ari has detached himself from the rest of the soldiers and gone on a private trip through Beirut airport in this sequence,” Polonsky says, describing one of Folman’s curious reveries in which the director recalls drifting through the airport in a trance before realising that the entire edifice has been destroyed, and that war is raging all around.

Waltz with Bashir is released on Friday

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