Lebanese contemporary art has been centrally concerned with memory of the civil war, in particular the instability of memory resulting from both the psychological foreclosures generated by trauma and the political erasures engendered by a post-war condition of amnesty, impunity, and imposed silence. In the absence of institutionally sanctioned archives and histories, the artists of the jeel al-harb (“war generation”)—Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Rabih Mroué, and others born in the mid-to-late 1960s—have produced conceptual archives, videos, and performances that intertwine the personal and the political, mix fact with fiction, and document marginalized histories while questioning the epistemological and political grounds for producing any historical account. These artists have achieved international renown for their experiments with hybrid forms combining documentary and speculative modes that underscore the mediation of memory, history, and truth. Younger Lebanese artists, however, have sought to break away from the dominant thematic concerns and aesthetic approaches of this celebrated generation. Many of these artists, too young to remember the war, approach Lebanon’s past through its connections to related histories, from bygone moments of pan-Arabism to various social movements and political conflicts past and present, especially Syria’s uprising, war, and refugee crisis. This paper will focus on two such artists, Marwa Arsanios and Mounira al-Solh (both born 1978), whose work shares similar concerns and manifests in related forms, especially through the centrality of drawing to their videos and installations, and in their emphasis on embodiment, both in portraits they draw and the presence of their own bodies in their videos. I will examine works by Arsanios and Al-Solh by attending to their mediations of regional history through the act of drawing and their complex relation to the act of witnessing violence. At a biographical level, their “witnessing” has been more indirect than that of their artistic predecessors; and yet it takes more embodied forms, a fact which stems in part from their feminist projects of narrating the radical potential of foreclosed histories differently. Drawing from recent literature in media and cultural studies, I will argue that animation—literally, drawing figures in motion, but at another level, imbuing history with vital forces, embodying social processes, interrupting the field of politics with laughter and levity—is a form and a process of opening up potential histories that have been repressed by the civil war and the erasures it produced, suggesting lines of flight from the critical foreclosures thematized by the jeel al-harb.