After listening to an army friend's recurring nightmare, Ari Folman realized that he couldn't remember anything about his Israeli military service during the 1982 war with Lebanon, instigating a quest for memory recovery that's depicted in Waltz with Bashir through animated recreations of real-life events, dreams and nonfiction interviews. Folman's chosen mode of presentation affords him an arresting, uninhibited style with which to transpose to screen his own fragmented memories as well as those of the friends and former comrades with whom he chats. Blending flash animation and two- and three-dimensional CG work, these sequences boast a striking visual approach that lends the action a dreadful, surreal beauty. Yet more than simply affording him a way to evocatively recount his story, Folman's animation serves as a distancing device akin to the way that Folman's mind used concealment to shield him from horrific traumas, a canny marriage of thematic and aesthetic concerns that nonetheless can't cover up the unsubtle redundancy of his story.  Nick Schager