"Waltz With Bashir," opening today at the Manor Theater, is unlike any war movie you've ever seen.

It's the first animated film to be nominated for an Oscar in the foreign language category. But it's as much an anti-war movie as "Paths of Glory," Stanley Kubrick's World War I film examining the gulf between the generals in their luxurious quarters and the foot soldiers in their miserable trenches.

It's only in the final minutes of "Waltz" that writer-director Ari Folman breaks the animated spell with archival news footage, as if to remind us that real people were slaughtered and actual relatives and friends wept and wailed over them.

Folman, who served in the Israeli Army during the first Lebanon War in the early 1980s, says in the movie's notes that war is nothing like what you've seen in American movies. "No glam, no glory."

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'Waltz With Bashir'

3 1/2 stars = Very good
Ratings explained

• Rating: R for some disturbing images of atrocities, strong violence, brief nudity and a scene of graphic sexual content
• Web site: waltzwithbashir.com

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His view: "Just very young men going nowhere, shooting at no one they know, getting shot by no one they know, then going home and trying to forget. Sometimes they can. Most of the time they cannot."

It turned out he forgot -- or repressed -- part of his memory about his military service. As he reconnects with fellow soldiers and friends, the scab over that period loosens and falls away.

Folman opens "Waltz" with an old friend, an accountant by trade, sharing his own disturbing and recurring dream about being chased by 26 snarling dogs. As it turned out, when the man's military unit went into villages looking for wanted Palestinians, the dogs would bark and give them away. It was his job to silence -- kill -- the dogs.

That triggers Folman's questions about his own blocked memories leading to the 1982 massacres at Lebanon's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Memory, he hears, is dynamic, alive and "takes us where we need to go."

It takes the filmmaker and others to past episodes where soldiers blindly emptied weapons out of fear and anxiety, on patrol through a sun-dappled orchard where children with rocket-propelled grenades lurked, and to the event that gives the movie its title.

It's toin Beirut where a real soldier and future Iron Man competitor shoots and zig-zags his way across the street in the shadow of enormous posters of Bashir Gemayel, the Maronite militia leader who had been elected president of Lebanon and was then assassinated. Gemayel's death triggered the massacre of hundreds of civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Folman, in the movie's notes, calls the carnage the worst thing that humankind can do to each other.

"One thing for sure is that the Christian Phalangist militiamen were fully responsible for the massacre. The Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with it. As for the Israeli government, only they know the extent of their responsibility," he states.

He did not set out to determine guilt or complicity (the subject of official inquiries and historians) but to provide a soldier's-eye view of the war and explore why memories evaporated or grew foggy. Vivid animation lends itself to depicting the nightmares, hallucinations and defense mechanisms -- in one man's case, viewing the horrors as if looking through an imaginary camera. Until that eventually failed.it breaks the imaginary camera breaks?

"Waltz" was first made as a realvideo based on a 90-page script, then turned into story boards and drawn with 2,300 illustrations turned into animation.

The nine people interviewed in "Waltz" are real, although two of them -- the man with the recurring nightmare about the dogs and a childhood friend now living with his family in the Netherlands -- did not want to appear on camera, even as animated versions of themselves. They were played by actors, but their testimonies are real, Folman says, and he does them vivid justice.

After all, as Marshall McLuhan once said: "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."