Waltz with Bashir ending explained

What happens

Folman finally remembers that he and his unit were near Beirut while Phalangist militiamen massacred people in Sabra and Shatila, and that Israeli flares lit the camps. The calm sea memory was a screen hiding his role as witness.

The last image

The animation stops and real footage shows the camps the morning after, with women wailing among the bodies.

What it says

Memory protects us by turning the unbearable into something beautiful, and facing the past is a moral act. The drawings gave Folman distance, so the film takes it away at the end: some things cannot be left as pictures.