to documentary or not to documentary

Waltz With Bashir is certainly a unique documentary film, but not simply because it is animated. Apart from the medium in which the film is done, it follows many of the tenets of documentary style, especially documentaries about wars: interviews with participants, narrative elements, and recreations of key moments or battles. The main question about the categorization of Waltz With Bashir arises from the fact that it isn't technically grounded in reality. 

The film begins with a dream, and much of it is spent trying to unravel the meaning of the dreams the veterans are having. Through dreams, flashbacks, and semi-hallucinatory conversations, the story of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila is unveiled. If the film had been shot in live-action, it would have lost all of the dreamlike qualities that animation lends to the portrayal of the dreams and the flashbacks. However, it does raise the question: is a documentary told by dreams really a documentary?

To me, Waltz With Bashir is still a documentary, because although it is technically grounded in dreams--not reality--those dreams are a part of the veterans' realities. Without the dreams and flashbacks, the war would not have been the same for them. In some ways, Waltz With Bashir is far more accurate in its portrayal of warfare than any live-action documentary could hope to be in that it brings the viewers inside the minds of the soldiers as they experience the war. We are seeing the war through their eyes, and the animation lends a sense of disconnect that all of the soldiers describe themselves experiencing from the war. They did not believe that it was real at times--and so the documentary is animated, or unreal.