Dogs, 26 of them, snarl and pant down the street, animated embodiments of blood lust, their eyeballs the urine color of the sky.

(They’re even angrier than when you watch those hybrid car ads implying your very act of motoring will cause roadside flowers to bloom, verdant orchards to swell with fruit and toothsome women to suddenly find themselves pregnant. And that’s pretty angry.)

All that smug can’t be good for the atmosphere.

“Waltz With Bashir” (2008, rated R) is beautiful, composed, smart, worried and suddenly wracked with pain over the past. Human, in all those essential, tragic parts. The animated documentary, about

Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, then at civil war, is fantastic despite its film festival accolades and subtitles (lately, an indicator of disaster ahead, as in, “Don’t go see the French movie ‘The Secret of the Grain’ unless you think half a movie should be close-ups of people chewing couscous with their mouths open”). The Bashir of the title is a Lebanese politician and member of the group who end up committing the massacre that, 20 years later, has crept upon the now middle-aged former soldiers in the night.

Written and directed by Ari Folman, the autobiographical subject matter is all the more engrossing as fine drawn art. It has the look of comic illustrator Joe Sacco, and it’s worlds better than “Waking

Life,” whose rotoscoped animation made me seasick. In “Waltz with Bashir,” bodies unloaded by troops during the war glisten under bright helicopter lights like packages of foil. You flinch when M1 Abrams tanks, three tiny lanes wide, roll through a Lebanese street, slowly crushing a line of parked cars, crumbling corners and backing into ancient plaster walls. The main character walks through a bustling Beirut airport and watches it disintegrate like the imagination it is to become a bombed-out reality. A silhouette of a soldier mimes playing guitar on his gun as bombs explode to the beat behind him — the tragic madness of young men is just that close.

The matter of the ending is anyone’s debate, but its style — the movie suddenly switches from animation to newsreel footage — arguably saps the movie of its somber punchline. Did the filmmakers think viewers wouldn’t believe the horrors of war unless proved by film? If “Waltz With Bashir” is to be, among other things, a message that animated documentaries are, well, Kosher, then why the late switch in format? It feels like last-minute, cold feet, costume stuck in zipper, “I’ll

be able to effect greater political change if I step down as the Governor of Alaska,” hogwash.

Still, that’s really nothing to get irked about, comparatively.

Correctly suspecting “Waltz with Bashir” was going to be an animated version of a redacted “Maus,” the Holocaust heavyweight and counterweight to every “Archie and Veronica” book in perpetuity, I’d

need something lighter to balance my mood. I snatched a Katt Williams DVD off the shelf. It was packaged like a stand-up routine and I wanted more “Pimp Chronicles.” No one roasted Michael Jackson better — not even Dave Chappelle. And Chappelle didn’t do it in a delicious green velour suit, like Williams.

But this Williams DVD was “Internet Dating” (2008, not rated), which is straight to video when it should have been straight to the trash compactor, produced with less talent than Mrs. Pinchback’s third-grade class Powerpoint presentations (neon words over images evoke blogarazzo Perez Hilton while unfunny thought bubbles fail to line up over bimbos’ heads) and so poorly scripted you’d think it was written by Lil’ Romeo. (Doesn’t he look like Snoop Pearson’s less-talented and uglier sister?) Romeo is to the ouevre of hip-hop what A.J. McLean, the rebellious Backstreet Boy, was to pop music. And sadly, “Internet Dating” was, really, written by Lil’ Romeo. To have a comedic knife

like Williams star in such an unfunny fart of a movie is like … well, like every Robin Williams movie in a dozen years. I would rather watch Patti Blagojevich bond with Lou Diamond Phillips on “I’m a

Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!” I would rather watch the network stations breathlessly cover Michael Jackson’s funeral like it was an episode of “Sabado Gigante” written by a mob of garment-rending

professional mourners.

The good thing is, because of the magic of YouTube, I can watch the skit someone accidentally caught of Williams out of their shirt pocket iPhone. Or the almost a year-old series “Scene Kid LOVE.” All the sense their very viewing makes some TV executive regress to some childhood trauma somewhere in Malibu. And with none of those hybrid car commercials.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.