The easy part was making the decision to do the documentary. The hard part was coming to grips with what happened in 1982.
"The major problem is to realize that there is a lot there you haven't done anything with," he says. "There is no way back once you start the process."
Folman made "Waltz With Bashir" first as a 90-minute video featuring interviews of his friends and soldiers also beset with nightmares and problems remembering that time.
He always envisioned "Waltz With Bashir" as an animated film, especially because it focuses on dreams, fantasy and loss of memory. "Animation gave me the freedom to do it," he says.
Once Folman completed editing the video version of "Bashir," he, Polonsky and director of animation Yoni Goodman broke it into storyboards.
"We decided this [scene] was going to be a talking head," says Goodman, whose animation background includes video and short films. "This is going to be a re-creation and this is going to be a fantasy. . . . Ari had very rough ideas of what he wanted. He was very open to suggestions."
Though some of the animation resembles Richard Linklater's 2006 film "A Scanner Darkly," Folman and Goodman say it wasn't done in the same method, in which animators trace over live-action footage.
"The film was done in mainly Flash animation, which is 2-D software," says Goodman. "We had to develop a system that would work for us where we would get a very high-quality look for the animation. We couldn't do a fully traditional animated feature because that would take 200 or 300 people, so we had to find a system that worked for us."
"You can't do a $1.5-million film and pretend you're Pixar, you know," adds Folman. "Basically, we took software that was made for home [computers] to the most extreme levels and made the film."
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susan.king@latimes.com
