Although “Another Day of Life” is coming to theaters from the animation distributor Gkids, it is in no way intended for children. Inspired by the book of the same title by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007), the movie is a harrowing chronicle of his time covering the civil war in the former Portuguese colony of Angola, beginning in 1975. For ideological reasons, and because the country was rich in diamonds and oil, the conflict was drawn into Cold War geopolitics.

The directors, Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow, tell the story mainly through motion-capture animation, which is periodically punctuated by archival footage and present-day interviews with survivors who knew Kapuscinski.

Whatever the intent, the animation serves multiple purposes. It removes some of the visceral factor of seeing gunfire and bloodshed. (In the interviews about that period, the reporter Artur Queiroz , who accompanied Kapuscinski on some of his travels, speaks of seeing c orpses lining 40 or 50 kilometers of road.) The animation also allows for interludes of overt surrealism, complementing Kapuscinski’s descriptions of the “confusão” of war (borrowing the Portuguese word for “confusion”) . The celebrated Israeli animated feature “Waltz With Bashir,” from 2008, took a similar approach, intermingling combat scenes and visual flights of fancy.