Ari Folman's semiautobiographical "Waltz With Bashir" is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars. It also was considered a potential nominee in the documentary and animation categories. I suppose you could call it an animated documentary by way of oral history, but it's best not to get caught up with labels concerning this film.

As a young man, Folman was in the Israeli army and fought in Lebanon. He was present at the Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 1982. He just can't remember any of it. "It's not stored in my system," he explains, and over the next few years he tries to reconstruct those missing memories with the help of friends and fellow soldiers.

This is both art and autobiography from Folman, a filmmaker with a deep interest in psychoanalysis. The memory gap was real, and those conversations on his odyssey back in time and memory (a couple of them reconstructed with actors, the rest recorded with the actual subjects) are the foundation of the script.

"The memory is dynamic," explains psychiatrist Ori Sivan. So is Folman's film, which uses animation not just to illustrate but explore the subjective quality of their remembrances, a mix of mind's-eye, first-person observation, dream, fantasy and the exaggeration of emotional memory. Executed in bold lines and slow but fluid movements, the film is never sensationalistic but always strikingly vivid and immediate.

What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre, an event that sent shock waves through Israelis who were made inadvertent collaborators. But the final word is not their emotional trauma, but the stark reality of the event itself.

By the end of the film, Folman has turned the camera back to actions that were so brutal and unforgivable he blocked them out. This time, there is no denying them.