In the mid1980s, just after Ari Folman had left the Israeli Army, he set off on a round-the-world backpacking adventure. Two weeks into his trip of a lifetime, Folman realised that travelling wasn’t for him, so he holed up in a Southeast Asian guest house where, for a year, he consumed the stories of fellow guests and turned them into his own fictional adventures to be sent home in letters to friends.

Repetition has worn the rough edges off this anecdote, which Folman tells to illustrate the fascination with story that attracted him to film-making. But it does rather neatly show the approach he has to the medium – personal, introspective and driven by an eloquent visual imagination.

Folman’s latest film, Waltz with Bashir, was one of the undisputed critical hits of Cannes 2008. When I meet him at the Sarajevo Film Festival he is in the middle of a punishing global tour of festivals – so much for the young ex-soldier who decided he didn’t like travelling. He says that he’s particularly looking forward to coming to London with the film. “Some of the happiest times of my childhood were spent in Belsize Park,” he says. “It’s my second home.”

Waltz With Bashir follows Folman’s attempt to piece together the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinian refugees during the first Lebanon war in the early Eighties, using his own shattered memories as a soldier during the conflict and interviews with others who where there. It was billed as the first feature-length animated documentary, but in fact it’s a haunting, occasionally nightmarish vision that defies easy categorisation.

The surreal strangeness of war

Ari Folman tells Wendy Ide about his animated view of war in Waltz with Bashir, and how there is 'no glamour in war'

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A memoir without memories perhaps? A biography of a war crime? What is certain is that no film since Apocalypse Now has more effectively captured the surreal, lucid dream strangeness of war, nor its destructive beauty. With the film, Folman asks questions of himself, his fellow soldiers and his country, but doesn’t necessarily find answers. The focus, he explains, is more philosophical than political.

“I took the decision not to deal with the [Israeli] political leadership and their responsibility because it is already known. I was interested in me and my friends. I was interested in a chronology of massacre – any massacre – and it is more than symbolic that we are talking about it in Sarajevo. How long does it take you when you hear and see things to realise that there is something that big going on?”

The film opens with one of many arresting sequences. Drawn in a colour palette of the slate blues and greys of storm clouds, a pack of slathering dogs race towards us. Their eyes glow the amber of an angry sun. This is a recurring dream that plagues Folman’s friend, Boaz. Late night in a bar, the two decide that the dream has a link to their time as soldiers in the war. It’s at this point that Folman realises that he has no memories of his time during the war.

Taking this as a starting point, Folman set out on a lengthy period of research, collecting stories from fellow soldiers and collating them into a narrative. There was never any question of the film being anything other than an animation. “Why animation? If you look at all the elements you have in the film; memory, lost memory, subconscious, dreams, lost dreams, lost youth, lost love, hallucinations – how else could you combine all that into one story line?”

The choice of animation was not without its problems, however. The budget – $2 million – was absurdly low, Folman says. “When we went with the film to Cannes, the distributors asked me not to say the number because they were afraid that people would start saying that the crew were abused during the making of the film.” Folman was forced to remortgage his house at one point to keep the project afloat.

He ran into another problem with some of the content of the film. In one scene young soldiers encounter an officer watching hardcore pornography. “There was a very big debate in my studio about it – most of them didn’t want us to do it at all. My art director wouldn’t have anything to do with it. More than that, I had to go to his mother before the premiere and tell her that he had nothing to do with it. And we had a really religious guy on the team so we had to work on the porn scene in the kitchen so that he would not be insulted.”

In fact, the scene is crucial in developing one of the key themes of the film – the way war and military service has, in Israel, become a benchmark by which to judge masculinity. “A lot of kids go and serve in the army for the wrong reasons. And one of the main reasons is that they think that it can impress the girls. The basic statement of the film is antiwar. It tells you that war – any war – is useless and very, very stupid in the eyes of the common soldier. There is no glamour in war, no glory, nothing that can really attract young boys to participate. And I hope that this message is really clear for young people.”

Waltz with Bashir shows at OWE2, Oct 24, 8.30pm and Phoenix, Oct 27, 6.30pm. General release: Nov 21

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