A Short Vision (1956)

A Short Vision, the work of Hungarian-born animator Peter Foldes and his British spouse Joan Foldes, may just be the most most celebrated animated film of all-time upon the subject of nuclear apocalypse; it is undoubtedly the most notorious.  Even The Big Snit and When The Wind Blows, for all their merits, can't quite boast that they traumatised an entire generation simultaneously in a precise sitting.  A Short Vision did exactly that, gaining special notoriety when it received its US television debut on the May 27th 1956 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show.  Sullivan introduced the film (then broadcast in black and white) as the Foldes' speculation on "what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped."  He advised that its content might be upsetting to younger children, reassuring them that they were "not to be alarmed...it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated", a statement which I'm sure merely piqued the curiosity of the younger members in his audience.  Sullivan also warned about the grim tone of the film, which proved to be no overstatement - anyone who assumed that "animal population" and "animated" meant that they were about to see a bit of Porky Pig-style capering was in for one hell of a rude awakening.  Although many were inevitably distressed by the film, Sullivan was widely applauded for his audacity in screening it, and the response proved so overwhelming that the short was shown again on the June 10th 1956 broadcast of the show.  This time round, Sullivan was much more forceful in his warning that the film might not be appropriate for younger viewers, here flat-out suggesting that they leave the room while it played.  This article on Conelrad Adjacent provides an astonishingly detailed account of how the film came to be screened on The Ed Sullivan Show and of its subsequent impact.

Sixty years on and A Short Vision has lost none of its potency.  The film, depicting the movements of an unidentified object (ominously referred to only as "it") which appears "unnoticed and uninvited" in the night sky and unleashes all manner of horrifying devastation upon the Earth below, is still shocking, and leaves the viewer with a gut-wrenching sensation which lingers long after its final harrowing moments.  On an aesthetic level it's an absolutely gorgeous film, consisting of numerous striking and richly-detailed images (many of which are entirely static, with animation consisting of simple dissolves), the haunting beauty of its visuals counterbalanced by the ferocious bleakness of its narrative, in which a first-person narrator (voice of James McKechnie) relates his chilling vision of nuclear apocalypse.

As noted in the Conelrad article, Sullivan's synopsis of the film as being about the effects of a dropped atomic bomb upon "the animal population of the world" is a trifle misleading, as the actual content of the Foldes' vision is far broader than that, extending to the total annihilation of ALL life on Earth.  Nevertheless, the terrors of the impeding catastrophe are conveyed most extensively through the reactions of four animals whose nightly routine of eating and avoiding being eaten is interrupted by the threat from above.  Two nocturnal predators - a leopard and an owl - are so overcome with fright at the realisation of what is approaching that they release their prey - a deer and a rat, respectively - and the four of them take cover in mutual fear of something far greater than all of them combined.  It is in these simple, frightened creatures that the viewer attains the bulk of their emotional investment - the film has no use for anthropomorphism, but we have no trouble in empathising with their desperation as they attempt to flee from an approaching object that they intuitively know to be terrible, our sympathies mingled with the horrific understanding that their instinctive impulses will not protect them from a threat of this magnitude.  The leopard, owl, deer and rat signify the innocent victims of warfare, utterly helpless in the face of an impending disaster beyond their control and, indeed, their comprehension, while in the primal conflict between predator and prey, nullified here by the arrival of an external force that poses an equally devastating threat to both, we see echoes of the human conflicts that have presumably given rise the creation of "it", and of the fragility that unites all living beings, no matter what side they stand upon.  The uneasy truce between predator and prey in the face of total annihilation is a reminder that nuclear warfare is an enemy to all; in Sullivan's words, that "in war there is no winner."

By contrast, the humans of A Short Vision appear painfully oblivious to the aerial invader, the majority of them caught off-guard and sleeping soundly in their beds as it passes directly over them.  There is a definite sense here that human apathy or indifference has been a factor in beckoning "it" into being; even the minority of humans who have their eyes wide open to what is about to strike them - the "leaders" and the "wise men" - do so too late, and all of them, whether they have seen it coming or not, are now bound to the same gruesome fate.  In addition to conveying the inertia of a human population who would sooner shut out the threat than react to it at all, the images of sleeping men, women and children relate something of the basic vulnerability of the human body; in their motionless, unconscious state, these figures seem frail and defenceless, and this too arouses our sympathies and our horror.

The vulnerability of the human body is evoked to a more overtly horrific extent in the film's climax when the dreaded explosion finally occurs, giving way to its starkest and most notorious sequence - a close-up of a human face as it slowly disintegrates, the eyeballs liquefied and the layers of skin torn back to reveal the skeletal framework underneath.  A less bloody but equally shocking sequence shows a young woman who is catapulted rapidly through the processes of aging and decay, until she too is stripped down to nothing more than skeletal remains.

Many analyses, the aforementioned Conelrad retrospective and the BFI commentary upon the film included, like to make a point of the fact that, as the film itself technically makes no explicit references to nuclear war or weaponry, the entire notion that "it" signifies an atomic bomb comes down to pure assumption on the viewer's part.  Indeed, there is nothing in the film's dialogue to directly indicate that we are witnessing a nuclear attack (as opposed to the apocalypse in a more general sense, or even an attack from extraterrestrial forces), although the insinuation is certainly present in the mushroom cloud imagery seen during the explosion, and in the implication that humankind could have potentially averted disaster if it had acted more swiftly.  That we never get a clear, close-up look at "it" adds superbly to the menace it exudes; it is simply a dark, distant shape of no particularly discernible form (in the early stages of the film it seen to morph continuously from one shape to another) and it carries a convincingly ominous and hauntingly alien air.  We recognise intuitively (much like those animals) that "it" does not belong in this world, and that its very presence threatens to tear the natural order to shreds.  As animated antagonists go, "it" simply doesn't get enough accolades.

The most devastating moment of A Short Vision occurs at the very end of the film when, following the complete obliteration of life on Earth, we are suddenly teased with the vague possibility of renewal.  A small glimmer of hope appears to have survived in the form of a flame which continues to flicker when everything around it is gone - save "it" itself, that is, which begins to circle the flame and, in one of the film's most surreal moments, is seen to transform into a moth.  At this stage, the "it" suddenly appears a lot less menacing - no longer an indistinct, alien form but a familiar and pathetic little creature that seems oddly compelled toward its own destruction.  "It" flirts with the flame until it too is consumed and, with that, the flame finally loses momentum and peters out, leaving only oblivion in its wake.  It is a hauntingly understated epilogue, coming in after the dramatic spectacle of the world being annihilated before our eyes, illustrating the finality of the devastation and snuffing out any lingering hopes of redemption that the viewer might still have.  In is in this closing void of blackness, and not the images of gruesome bodily horror that precede it, that A Short Vision deals its most withering blow, leaving the viewer with a deadening sense of emptiness and loss, in mourning for a cartoon Earth which seemed so rich, so vivid and, above all, so powerless in the face of its impending destruction.