Christmas is approaching, and I decided it was finally time to do something I thought of far enough back that my other review features were directly based on it. Way back when I was first making my way onto the internet, one of the first things I tried was animation reviews. When I thought of getting back into things with this blog, I thought of going back to my roots with a series on “dark” cartoons. My ground rules were that these would be “mainstream” cartoons really (or at least apparently) geared toward kids. My reasoning for this was that the independent, adult-oriented cartoons tend to desensitize anyone but moral guardians who think anything animated must be aimed at kids. The likes of Ralph Bakshi and Jan Svankmajer do weird and freaky because people expect them to do weird and freaky. To me, the most truly subversive and disconcerting toons are the ones that seem to happen almost by accident, like a Saved By The Bell rerun interrupted by the first reports from Columbine. What I mainly had under consideration were episodes from TV shows from the 1980s to early ‘90s, but I quickly decided there was one much earlier cartoon I was going to have to do at some point. So here is “Goodwill Toward Men”, a short about nuclear war by the creators of Tom And Jerry.
Our story opens with the sound of a choir singing a carol in a snowy landscape that’s almost idyllic, except for visible ruins under the snow. Our first hint that something is “off” is the words to the carol, recognizable as “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” but subtly changed. References to Jesus become “the Lord Our King”, “nations” becomes “we creatures free”, and the chorus runs, “See at last the world set free/ Peace on Earth, forevermore.” As the song finishes, we see a choir of mice, singing in the ruins of a human church. As the song finishes, one of the mice muses, “What are men?” The elderly mouse directing the choir than tells his tale of the bygone race that built the church and a war that destroyed them. It’s accompanied by scenes of soldiers in masks (described as “tremendous snouts”) battling each other, culminating in the exchange of two “biggest most awfulest bombs” that seem to consume the world in two bubbles of red and green (!). Then the old mouse tells his own story, huddling with the other animals in the church. There, they discover the “book of rules”, read by a wise old owl, with a dramatic pause for the command, “Thou shalt not kill.” Of course, it all ends with a hopeful scene of the happy animals gathering to worship their creator, and the song is repeated with the church radiantly lit, all to show that human religion can outlive humanity.
What strikes me about this cartoon is that it feels like the stories I was coming up with in elementary and high school, yet I can’t remember it nor think of any way I could have seen it until much later. In my further recollections, I did see some incarnation of Tom And Jerry as a kid, and if it wasn’t the original series, it still stood out to me as odd and unusually violent. On the other hand, I’m sure I didn’t get familiar with the original series until I was approaching 30. From what I know now, the franchise had the unenviable fate of simultaneously fading into nostalgia and being actively stripped of everything that had made it innovative and memorable. It’s against this backdrop that I first discovered this cartoon, mixed into a compilation of Tom And Jerry among other vintage shorts. Yet, even with all these allowances for the debasement of the memory of the original short, this is still one of the most jaw-droppingly dark vintage toons one could encounter. In the best “what the Hell” tradition, it seems to come out of nowhere, particularly compared to other work from the people involved.
The one thing that makes this toon comprehensible is that it is in fact part of a genre of anti-war animation, including the 1939 short “Peace On Earth” that it is usually considered a remake of. In my assessment, “remake” doesn’t quite fit, despite the obvious debt; “update” comes closer, but still doesn’t give the whole picture. On careful examination, the present selection leaves out a number of scenes and elements of the original, notably a melodramatic scene of two soldiers killing each other. What it adds is of course a portrayal of nuclear weapons. Here, it also contrasts with the near-contemporary “A Short Vision”, replacing the quite graphic portrayal of death and devastation with stylized images that emphasize the scope of a global nuclear conflict. What etches it uniquely in the mind is precisely how conventional it is in animation and visual style, complete with mice that look exactly like Jerry.
As for my own feelings on this, I have never been able to get around the fact that I personally took the same concept in different directions long before I knew anything about it. Even in the world of cartoons, a rat imbued with sentience still acts more or less like a rat. Among the wreckage of human civilization, their lot would be continuous fleeing and hiding from a pyramid of threats, including potentially sentient predators like the wise old owl. There’s plenty more to take issue with in the portrayal of Judeo-Christian religion as “rules”, a humanist conceit that barely survived into the 1950s. I tried my hand working these and other things when I brought the Evil Possum back with “Trails”, which I still need to revise and edit. I will freely admit to basing the holy place in that story on both this short and its earlier counterpart; from my own stats, the chapter in the church was the one that actually got read.
In full hindsight, this
is a toon that in its own way was as self-datingly naïve as more conventional animation of its time, which is
really going to be a common denominator in this feature. Still, it asks the
question that is even more apt decades after: Why don’t humans obey the
supposedly divine absolutes of our scriptures. The answers may be as obvious as
they are depressing, but the time we stop asking will be the day all hope
becomes lost.
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