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CANNES, France: The apocalypse came early to the Cannes Film Festival this year, filling screening rooms with snarling dogs, bursting bombs, shouting men and screaming women. Midway through Day 2, on Thursday, characters had gone blind, gone to prison, gone to war. One had turned into a piece of furniture, and another had crawled out of a sewer, slimed in waste that the filmmaker threw at the audience with giggles, metaphorically speaking, ofcourse.

Cannes has a tradition of shaking audiences up, sometimes all the way out the nearest exit. Last year on Day 1, the festival unveiled “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” the Romanian film about illegal abortion during the Ceausescu era, which took home the Palme dOr. This year that same competition slot was occupied by another powerhouse film, “Waltz With Bashir,” an animated documentary from Israel about the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Written and directed by Ari Folman, who has made some half-dozen live-action documentaries, and animated by the Bridgit Folman Film Gang, the movie is a soldiers story by one of their own: the haunted young man at its center is Folmanhimself.

He plunges us right into his nightmare with a harrowing vision of low-down and dark dogs running at the camera, teeth bared and eyes glowing bilious orange-yellow. The dogs run and they run, gathering in number as they cut a swath through everything and everyone ? men, women, children ? in theirpath.

People scatter like pebbles, and a ribbon of slobber lashes the camera lens. Finally, the dogs stop under a window where a man several stories up from the street warily looks down at the snapping, barking, growling menace below. Cut to a bar, where a man, Ari ( Folman), asks his friend Boaz, the man who has dreamed himself into that phantasmagoric scene, what happens next. “I wake up,” Boazsays.

Like Boaz, who is haunted by the war in Lebanon (or rather his absence of its memories), Ari is plagued by a past he cant recall. And so he sets out to uncover history, to sift through the memories of other Israeli soldiers ? all but two of the nine testimonials are firsthand accounts ? and to make sense of the one image he does retain, that of three young soldiers rising naked out of the sea and somnolently drifting into the Beirut battlefield. As in “Maus,” Art Spiegelmans two-volume graphic novel about the Holocaust, the animation in “Waltz With Bashir” initially works as something of a distancing device, giving you the space ? intellectual, emotional ? to process the story and its accumulatinghorrors.

Folman isnt a revisionist: he points fingers at the followers of Bashir Gemayel, the charismatic Christian militia leader and Lebanons president-elect whose assassination preceded the mass murder at the camps, and saves hard words for Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli defense minister. Folman also doesnt blink when it comes to what young soldiers do in wartime: at the sniper who lethally picks a man off a donkey, at the tank that crushes flowers and then cars under its wheels, taking down men drinking coffee and buildings alike. First pop songs fill the air and then yellowflares.

Brought to vital, plausible life in a combination of Flash, classic and 3-D animation, the characters look as if they stepped right out of a graphic novel. Their faces and bodies, for instance, are outlined in black, but their faces are so ductile and expressive that I was surprised that they hadnt been rotoscoped (the animation technique in which live-action movement is traced over). The fluidity of the figures accentuates the air of surreality ? one soldier compares war to an acid trip ? which deepens as the story reaches its terrible end. That finale, which finds the animation violently giving way to live-action documentary footage, is stunning, at once a furious act of conscience and alament.

“Waltz With Bashir,” which as of Thursday afternoon did not have American distribution, was a welcome tonic, given the cloying aftertaste left by the festivals opening selection. Bad openers are another Cannes tradition, so it wasnt much of a surprise that “Blindness” is such a misfire. The film, which heads to American theaters later this year (via Focus Features), was directed by Fernando Meirelles, who shook up screens in 2002 with “City of God,” an art-house exploitation film with lots of bullets and not enough brains, and then went higher-brow with an adaptation of John le Carr?s “Constant Gardener.” Based on a novel by the Nobel laureate Jos? Saramago, this new film goes higher up the brow still, with an allegory with a very large capitalA.

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