The notion of a feature-length animated documentary contradicts our sense of both documentary and animation, a circumstance that suggests the unique achievement of Ari Folman in "Waltz With Bashir." Exploring memory, the past, and the horrors of war, the director shot his movie as a videotaped study, then transformed it, through the graphic enhancement that very roughly resembles the methods of the recent "A Scanner, Darkly" and some television commercials, into its present form, a remarkable and original combination of film and cartoon.

The movie opens like a horror flick, with a pack of maddened dogs, eyes glowing, barking, slobbering, racing through city streets toward a particular building, to awaken a man who has only dreamed them in a recurring nightmare. That dream originates in an incident he remembers from his participation in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 20 years previously. When he tells Folman, who provides the major voice-over narration, the filmmaker cannot recall anything about his own service during that conflict; he resolves to recapture the memory by speaking to some of his friends, acquaintances, fellow soldiers, a journalist, and a psychologist about the experience.

The filmmaker's various interviews with those people turn into a journey into the past that also resurrects his own memories. His old friends, each identified on the screen, speaking in their own voices, tell him of their involvement in the invasion, focusing on a particular incident, a massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, a couple of refugee camps in Lebanon. Although their Phalangist allies conducted the slaughter, the Israeli military, apparently with the full cooperation of their leaders, stood by and in effect supported the action.

The calm, thoughtful responses of Folman's interviewees contrast powerfully with the substance of their recollections. Each provides some piece of his experiences, which together paint a picture of the whole invasion, leading up to the climactic attack on the camps. As each reveals his peculiar torment, Folman's own memories, initially blocked by post traumatic stress, return, revealing his own confused sense of guilt.

Among its other revelations, the picture provides an entirely different insight into the Israeli military from the usual view of a tough, disciplined, professional fighting force. In every narrator's story the army seems composed mostly of reluctant warriors, frightened kids who panic under fire, shooting blindly at anything, led by incompetent, uncaring officers. They understand some of the ironies of their situation, most apparent in the waltz of the title, when a soldier dances around an open space, dodging bullets, firing his machine gun at snipers, under the gaze of posters of the Phalangist leader, Bashir Gemayel.

The film's deceptively simple structure constantly frames stories within stories, as one account feeds into another, and memories shift into dreams and even hallucinations. One narrator recalls a dream, really a kind of foreshadowing, in which a naked giantess rescues him from the craft transporting him to Lebanon and swims away, cradling him happily between her huge and beautiful thighs. The animation reflects those several transitions, changing from objective line drawings of the adult responders to comic book images of their youthful selves, and sometimes even suggesting the dark, jagged appearance of popular graphic novels, with a figure drawn sharply as if in a panel, against odd, changing backgrounds.

After all the stories, sewn together within Folman's own narration and commentary, "Waltz With Bashir" reaches its promised climax in the details of the attack that preoccupies all the responders. In some horribly resonant sequences, the soldiers herd women and children onto trucks, allowing the Phalangist militias to enter the camps and begin their slaughter. With a kind of devastating inevitability, the picture shifts shockingly from animation to gritty videotape, apparently newsreel footage, of the scenes the Israelis encounter when they follow the militias.

If Ari Folman had made "Waltz With Bashir" in the form of a traditional documentary, the usual assortment of talking heads and voice-overs would probably rob the film of most of its meaning and impact. To tell his story through animation makes his movie an extraordinary work, a film that changes our understanding of both documentary and animation, and ultimately an original and imaginative rethinking of the art of film.

Waltz With Bashir

(R), written and directed by Ari Folman

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