Peace On Earth, Hugh Harman's classic 1939 animated short about a community of pacifist sciurines inheriting the Earth after humankind's war-induced extinction, had such a powerful message that it bore repeating sixteen years later. In 1955, a new version of the story materialised, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and co-produced by Fred Quimby, and titled after the other phrase that the animals in Harman's film were especially fond of saying, Good Will To Men. The original short came about during the early days of World War II, and reflected the apprehension of a world about to relive the nightmare of global warfare. Good To Will To Men, meanwhile, explores the technological advances that had since modified the face of warfare, encompassing concerns regarding the Cold War, and the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation that humankind, having inflicted on itself, seemed forever saddled with. Like its predecessor, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, but also lost, this time to Warner Bros' Speedy Gonzales.
While the alternate title suggests that Good Will To Men is to be viewed more as a companion piece to Peace On Earth, it is a direct recycling of the latter's narrative, with many of the individual sequences, such as the owl reading out Biblical passages in the ruins of a church, being recreated more-or-less faithfully. A number of the finer details have been slightly tweaked - the family of squirrels have been replaced by a chorus of murine choir boys (and very characteristic Hanna-Barbera mice they are too), while the patriarchal figure old enough to recall the horrors of humankind's dying days, and of Earth's regeneration via the friendly woodland folk, is now a mouse deacon. Although the conclusion he reaches is very much the same, the focus of his speech has shifted, moving away from humanity's propensity to fight about anything and everything under the sun, to humanity's talent for devising increasingly diabolical methods of mass slaughtering one another - everything from bazookas to flamethrowers to finally "the biggest, the most awfullest bomb ever...and while one of them was dropping the bomb over here, the other was dropping the bomb over there!" Now that the apocalypse has been explicitly linked to the work of Oppenheimer, the scenario is somewhat muddied by the practicality of whether, having nuked themselves out of existence, the humans would have left the Earth in an inhabitable state for whichever lifeform fancied taking up the mantle as the next dominant species. Good Will To Men makes vague concession to this point, by indicating that the natural world suffered heavy damages along with the human world (the deacon specifies that the new society was made up of "those of us that were left"), but the problem of nuclear winter is largely untouched on.
Good Will To Men is on all counts the inferior of the two films - other than fine-tuning its narrative to comment more specifically on the nuclear threat, it doesn't do or say anything that its predecessor didn't accomplish more proficiently sixteen years prior. The post-apocalyptic world is admittedly established with greater efficiency than in Harman's film (remember how many times Grandpa Squirrel had to say "Peace on Earth" before getting to the point?), but the framing device with the mouse deacon and his choir singing underlings rather lacks the same degree of warmth and intimacy as the domestic sequences in Peace On Earth. With the squirrels you got a strong enough sense of the bonds between the individual family members; there was something almost heartbreakingly vulnerable about their small and personal unit, even in perpetual peacetime. The young sciurines being lulled to sleep at the end, to their mother's assurances of heavenly peace, seemed such fragile beings that you could practically feel your own contaminating presence as a human onlooker casting a threatening shadow across their utopia, even if, in-universe, we were long out of the picture. Here, the same basic idea is conveyed - the older generation, who have witnessed the horrors of old, passing the torch to the younger - but with less of the same emotional connection to its protagonists. The image of those resting infants strikes such a powerful chord, in part, because of the sense that they could be our own children; the question Harman implicitly raises has to do with the discrepancy between the world we want for our offspring and the world we may in fact be fostering, a point evoked with overall less sharpness in Good Will To Men. What the latter does push more vigorously, and to its detriment, is the story's religious overtones. These same overtones were present in Peace On Earth too, but Harman managed to incorporate them in a manner that was both authentically moving and comparatively light on heavy-handedness; approaching the film from a secular perspective, the basic message feels no less accessible and, beyond the owl calling the Bible "a mighty good book of rules", I can appreciate the film without getting too strong a sense that it's trying to overtly sell me on a particular religious ideology. Good Will To Men, by contrast, has moments where it plays itself as an unsubtle advert for Christianity, with the deacon mouse holding up a Bible directly to the camera and proclaiming "It still is a good book of rules!"
Which is not to say that Good Will To Men is lacking in clout - the narrative set-up of a post-apocalyptic society of innocents attempting to wrap their heads around just what the hell their war-mongering predecessors were thinking is such an intrinsically powerful one that it's impactful in any form, and Hanna and Barbera's film incorporates a few new images that have a harrowing potency all of their own, in particular, a quiet, lingering shot showing the tombstones of the innumerable causalities of war. The sequence in which the A-bomb travels in both directions is depicted with understated but sickening horror, as the two opposing blasts coded red and green gradually merge into a single, deathly grey, signifying mutual defeat (although it doesn't have quite the same raw, brutal intensity as its equivalent sequence in Harman's film, with the metaphorical image of the last two humans on Earth choosing to continue their vendetta to the end, which was admittedly hampered by its own uneven execution). Another chilling new addition is the deacon's observation that, after the bombs had fallen and the last of the humans were wiped out, "Everything was quiet and kind of peaceful-like", the only point in Good Will To Men where I detect the same degree of vinegary irony that makes Harman's film so beguiling.
One element that was jettisoned from Hanna and Barbera's version, and this surprised me, is the entire "Ye shall rebuild the old wastes" plot point. Instead, the random Biblical passage that ends up becoming the basis for the animals' incoming civilisation is "Love thy neighbor as thyself". It's worth noting that, while they communicate essentially the same moral, the implications of the ending feel drastically altered in Good Will To Men. Surveying the two shorts I can't help but be put in mind of Ed Sullivan's synopsis when introducing Joan and Peter Foldes' classic anti-nuke film A Short Vision on its television debut in 1956: "what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped" feels like a more fitting plot description for either of the two MGM shorts, although it goes without saying that neither is intended as serious speculation as to how our beastly friends would make the most of a post-human Earth. In both films, the anthropomorphic animals are holding up mirrors to our own ornery human conditions, but it is not the same mirror in either case. Peace On Earth depicts a fantasy image of a peaceful society that is all the more upsetting for the fact that is is a fantasy - it suggests a fairy tale innocence far out of reach. In Good Will To Men, the animals play more explicitly as analogues for the choices facing humankind in the present - when the mouse deacon tells his underlings, "Love thy neighbor as thyself...on those words depend the future of us all," he is extending his message to his real world human viewership, and to their own predicament, with a reminder that the outcome has yet to be determined. Hanna and Barbera's film expresses implicit hope that the rebuilding aspect can be rendered moot, if a more peaceful solution is found.
Good Will To Men ends in a different place to its predecessor - it is now the children who regale the adults with the cheerful promise of perpetual peace (a signal that such values have been successfully transplanted into the generation set to lead in the future), as members of their post-apocalyptic community gather for a Midnight Mass and greet one another cordially. This is a fantasy image as much as anything in the 1939 film, but expressed with an optimism to which Peace On Earth seemed deliberately ambivalent. Whereas the happy ending in Peace On Earth was tempered with the uneasy knowledge that the enemy is us, in Good Will To Men there is a greater sense of inclusiveness, as if we are being invited to join these critters in their benevolent festivities. For a film that's ostensibly about the end of humankind, it's certainly got its fingers crossed that the best is yet to come.
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