The current volume and many recent studies (see, for example, Honess Roe 2013; Formenti 2014) demonstrate just how much creative and critical interest in animated documentary filmmaking has grown over the past decade. This essay discusses perhaps the most widely debated individual film associated with that phenomenon, Israeli director Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (2008). The notably complex narrative and thematic subject matter of Folman's feature has provoked scholarly responses ranging across many disciplines, including trauma studies (Ashuri 2010; Morag 2013; Rastegar 2013) and memory studies (Stewart 2010; Yosef 2010). Most prominently of all, though, Waltz with Bashir has been widely seen as a pioneering and potentially paradigmatic reference point within ongoing attempts to establish animated documentary cinema's potential and aesthetic, conceptual and ethical parameters. Granted, there exist analyses of Folman's film that take the idea of ‘ani-mated documentary’ as a relatively neutral descriptive label (see, for example, Yosef 2010: 311). Much more common, however, is the idea of Waltz with Bashir as an intriguing taxonomical test case. Indeed, Folman himself already drew attention to this notion at the time of Waltz with Bashir's original theatrical release. He complained then that he had:

The sense of Waltz with Bashir as a work that calls received critical and cultural categories and conventions into question has only deepened in the years since.

In part this is because, as well as spanning multiple disciplinary fields, critical debate around Waltz with Bashir also displays heterogeneity in terms of the assessments that the film has provoked of animated documentary's possible strengths and weaknesses as a contemporarily emergent mode of moving image practice. Some observers emphasise allegedly problematic and/or paradoxical aspects of the animated documentary phenomenon: ‘the documentary's moving pictures are filtered through the distorting lens of hand-drawn images … an apparent contradiction’ (Aoun 2009: 150).