Waltz with Brashir (2008)

Picasso’s “Guernica” has come to life. The Israeli animated documentary film “Waltz with Brashir” is the first cartoon (too light a word I know, I can’t think of another) that has left me absolutely speechless with horror and sadness over man’s constant desire to kill because his God is better than the other guy’s God.

“Waltz” is told from the perspective of writer/director Ari Folman, a veteran of the Israeli Army, who fought and killed in a 1982 war with neighbor Lebanon. While there, Folman witnessed a massacre of hundreds of Muslim men, women and children by vengeful Christian militants and his own troops, but doesn’t recall it.

That’s the peg of this film: Recalling the seemingly unforgettable. It’s a disturbing, beautifully told and painted tale with a hard “R.” As fellow veterans and then Folman speak of their memories, we see war action rendered in vivid, bloody detail, with chucks of almost expressionist imagery filling the screen. Blood, too.

Is the film accurate? I don’t know. It makes no bones about the tit-for-tat violence that religious zealots of all stripes visit upon each other, and even suggests that Israel’s war crimes can be compared a certain 20th century war demon.

That Folman fades to live action in the finale to show real unfathomable carnage – bullet-riddled, desecrated women and children and old men in piles – is a shock almost unbearable too watch. With “Presopolis,” the animated film genre has made some mind-bending strides in recent years. This is one of the best. A