Filmmaker Ari Folman had difficultly getting financing for Waltz with Bashir, in part because no one would embrace the idea of making an animated documentary. Although animation has grown far outside the confines of the children’s “cartoon,” apparently Folman’s idea of an animated memoir, exploring his mental block surrounding his military service during the Israeli army’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, was too unusual to fit anyone’s idea of either animation or documentary.
Thankfully, he didn’t give up, because the beauty and power of the film is astonishing. By now, of course, the idea of viewing realistic events through the animated looking glass is not so unusual. Rotoscoped films like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly have introduced the contemporary cinema-goer to the surrealist atmosphere that animation can provide, as have motion capture films like Sin City. The craft employed for Waltz with Bashir, however, is in its own class. It is hard to believe, but the animation team claims that not a single scene was rotoscoped. Instead, they used reference video and employed a computer process by which the hand drawn figures were dissected and animated.
However the resulting imagery was achieved, the slightly off-beat human movement on top of beautifully stylized and realistically rendered environments perfectly express both the film’s personal narrative — a meditation on dreams, memory, and self-discovery — as well as the complicated political and military context in which the young soldier Folman found himself. From the obvious symbolism of the opening dog-chase sequence to the heartbreaking realistic live video coda, the painstaking process by which Folman subjects himself and his country to the most vulnerable scrutiny creates an experience that is both liberating and burdening. An event I shamefully knew nothing about has now been made strangely relevant and personal to me, even if I still don’t fully understand it. That’s some cartoon.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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