Q. This is a still from the feature length animated film Waltz with Bashir. Why would it makes sense to animate a film about war?

A. Waltz with Bashir is a superb animated film, directed by Ari Folman, illustrated by David Polonsky and with animation directed by Yoni Goodman. If you haven’t seen it, the film is Folman’s personalized account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre that occurred in Beirut in 1982, when Israeli soldiers murdered more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees. In the film, Ari tries to piece together his involvement in the massacre from his painfully suppressed memory, with the help of others who were with him at the time. There are other films that effectively communicate the depravities of war but it is highly innovative to tell this particular story through drawings. This approach works for two reasons: memories are very much like dreams, and the use of animation to help us understand the process of piecing together fragments of surrealist memory is particularly affecting. Probably more importantly, however, is the fact that the event is so emotionally disturbing and heinous that it would be nearly impossible to honor its gravity by acting it out. As seen below, the true images of Sabra are so hideous that they can barely be taken in by the viewer. That is probably why the filmmakers present the actual photographic evidence of the massacre at the very end, as the audience would be unable otherwise to suspend their emotional reaction to such a sight in an effort to understand how it could ever have occurred.