Film

Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman's animated documentary sends him back through the 1982 Lebanon War to recover memories he's lost, mainly around the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Real interviews with fellow veterans get filtered through hallucinatory, rotoscope-style animation, so testimony and dream blur together. It's hypnotic, unsettling, gorgeous to look at, and unlike most war films — more interested in the fog memory leaves behind than in combat itself.

TMDb rating7.7

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Persepolis2007

Another animated memoir turning a country's trauma into intimate, visually inventive testimony — Marjane Satrapi's Iranian childhood under revolution and war, drawn with the same emotional candour Folman brings to his own memories.

But The black-and-white style is gentler and more whimsical, so if you wanted Bashir's nightmarish intensity, this may feel comparatively soft.

Persepolis poster

The Fog of War2003

Errol Morris interviews Robert McNamara about Vietnam decision-making, and watching an old man wrestle openly with culpability decades later feels like the documentary cousin to Folman's own reckoning.

But No animation, no dream logic — just a man, a chair, and archival footage. Purely talking-head in form.

The Fog of War poster

Flee2021

A more recent animated documentary using shifting styles to depict a refugee's fractured, half-suppressed memories of fleeing Afghanistan — same tools, same instinct that memory needs its own visual language.

But Focuses on displacement and asylum rather than combat guilt, so the moral terrain is different even if the method matches.

Flee poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Night and Fog1956

Resnais's essay-documentary technique — poetic narration laid over unbearable real footage — is the direct forerunner of the tradition Folman works within decades later, atrocity approached obliquely rather than reenacted.

Half a century before Bashir, Alain Resnais proved that atrocity could be approached through poetry and unbearable stillness rather than narrative recreation — this is the ancestor of Folman's whole method.

But It's 32 minutes of unflinching Holocaust footage with no animation or comfort — brutal, historical, and not an easy watch.

Night and Fog poster
More like this (7)

Grave of the Fireflies1988

Animation proves it can carry the full weight of war's civilian cost here too, in a Studio Ghibli film that refuses to soften WWII firebombing for its young protagonists.

But It's devastating in a much more direct, unrelenting way — less cerebral puzzle, more emotional gut-punch, no adult remove.

Grave of the Fireflies poster

Apocalypse Now1979

The other great film about soldiers' minds dissolving under the weight of what they've seen and done, told as fevered, hallucinatory descent rather than after-the-fact reconstruction.

But It's a scripted Hollywood war epic, not documentary testimony, and its madness is theatrical rather than personal confession.

Apocalypse Now poster

The Act of Killing2012

Joshua Oppenheimer gets Indonesian death-squad leaders to reenact their massacres on camera, an even more unsettling study of memory, denial and self-mythology than Bashir's.

But Its subjects are unrepentant perpetrators rather than a guilt-ridden witness, so the moral experience is far more disturbing, not cathartic.

The Act of Killing poster

Tower2016

A lesser-known animated documentary rotoscoping survivor testimony of the 1966 University of Texas sniper attack — structurally close kin to Bashir's method of drawing over real voices.

But Smaller scale and far less internationally celebrated, so it lacks the poetic ambition and score that make Bashir so distinctive.

Tower poster

Jarhead2005

A grunt's-eye account of boredom, anticipation and disillusionment during the Gulf War, useful for anyone who wants the soldier's interior experience without Bashir's animated remove.

But More conventional war-movie plotting and none of the memory-puzzle structure or visual imagination that defines Folman's film.

Jarhead poster

Beaufort2007no page yet

An Israeli film set during the same Lebanon conflict, following soldiers holding an outpost as the war winds down — same terrain, same national reckoning, told as straight drama.

But Conventional live-action war filmmaking without any of Bashir's formal daring; it plays it much straighter.

Beau Travail2000no page yet

Both films find soldiers' repressed longing and violence expressed through near-ritualised movement — Denis's literal dance answers Folman's own title, trading documentary reconstruction for pure sensory meditation on military brotherhood.

Claire Denis turns Foreign Legion training into hypnotic, near-wordless choreography, and its famous closing dance rhymes eerily with the surreal waltz imagery at the heart of Folman's film.

But There's barely any plot or dialogue — it's mood and movement over narrative, which will frustrate anyone wanting answers or exposition.

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The Act of Killing, M*A*S*H, Catch-22, In Bruges, Night and Fog, The Missing Picture, Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime, Come and See, The Look of Silence, Full Metal Jacket, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, The Tale, The Cave, The Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, Dick Johnson Is Dead, Berserk, The Triplets of Belleville, Life, Animated, Stories We Tell, Korengal, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, The Square, Cobain: Montage of Heck, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, Persona, Da 5 Bloods, American Sniper, The Little Drummer Girl, The Dragon Prince, Flee, Notes on Blindness, The Battle of Chile: Part I, Devilman Crybaby, Tarnation, Persepolis, The Interrupters, Tower, Armadillo, El Sicario, Room 164, Once Upon a Time in America, No End in Sight, Body of Lies, Taxi to the Dark Side, Sherman's March, Testament of Youth, Born on the Fourth of July, The Breadwinner, Long Night's Journey into Day, Hearts and Minds, Chicago 10, War and Peace of Mind, In the Year of the Pig, The Silence of Others, The Kingmaker, Loving Vincent, Last Men in Aleppo, HyperNormalisation, Cameraperson, Let There Be Light, The Giver, Five Broken Cameras