The Japanese have been making grown-up cartoons for decades. But the emphasis of so much anime has been on sci-fi and fantasy and it's only recently that animators have begun to tackle weightier topics in the graphic novel style of, say, Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi made an excellent job of adaptating the latter’s autobiographical opus, Persepolis. But although this provocative account of a young girl’s experiences after fleeing the Ayotollah’s Iran won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar, it has been surpassed, in terms of both content and form, by Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, a chilling animated memoir of the massacres by Christian militiamen at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the Lebanon, where Folman was serving as a soldier following the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel.

Contrasting with the monochrome austerity of Persepolis, the mutedly coloured, Rotoscopesque graphics have a detailed, comic-book gravitas that makes them seem more realistic and plangent. Opening with a nightmare about a pack of hounds hurtling through the streets before snarlingly prowling beneath a veteran’s window, the action turns on a psychiatrist’s warning about the unreliability of memory and Folman’s need to find what happened to the Palestinian refugees seeking sanctuary on the outskirts of Beirut in 1982.

On reuniting with friends like Boaz and Carmi (fictional composites of eyewitnesses), Folman recalls the cameraderie among the Israeli troops as they travelled into the war zone. But Ronnie Dayag prefers to remember the bellicosity of his brothers in arms after he swam back to base having survived an ambush and was accused of abandoning the other members of his tank crew. And journalist Ron Ben-Yisahi taps into the brutal surrealism of combat with his recollection of Shmuel Frenkel’s indiscriminate firing of a machine gun after he had seen too many comrades used for target practice by snipers hiding in shelled-out tenements.

By the time the focus falls on the camps, however, such hallucinatory horror has given way to a sombre authenticity. Even more devastating is the climactic inclusion of newsreel footage of the slaughter’s aftermath. With the shifts between hand-drawn and computer-enhanced imagery adding to the jarring audiovisual effect, this may miss the Palestinian and Phalangist perspective. Nevertheless, in exploring the fear, revulsion and guilt felt by so many of the bystanding Israelis, it serves as a noble and highly personal act of atonement.

Timing is everything in a musical documentary and Raymond De Felitta was exceedingly fortunate to encounter be-bopper Jackie Paris during the 2004 comeback that proved to be his swan song. Feted by everyone from Charlie Parker to Chet Baker and ranked by some critics alongside Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, Paris made just four albums before disappearing into a cabaret-ish double act with his second wife, Anne-Marie Moss.

Ultimately, in Tis Autumn – The Search for Jackie Paris, De Felitta discovers that a combination of misfortune and egotism sabotaged the crooner’s career. He also unearths a disaffected son during a tabloid-like coda that feels as much a misjudgement as having Peter Bogdanovich and other luvvie luminaries read some of Paris’s old reviews. But the fascination here lies in watching the septuagenarian tinkering with his legend during memory lane sessions that are counterpointed by exquisite recordings and some deeply moving live performances.

David Parkinson