Peace On Earth '39 (aka The Meek Shall Inherit)

You would be hard-pressed to find a more beguilingly incongruous Christmas-themed cartoon than Hugh Harman's 1939 MGM short Peace On Earth (excepting, maybe, its 1955 remake, Good Will To Men). It is a work of exhilarating contradictions, a sincere plea for pacifism related via a deliberately quirky narrative device, one that thrives on the juxtaposition of innocence with trauma, and an ending in which the closing words of optimism seem drenched in vinegary irony. The film, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short but lost out to Disney's The Ugly Duckling, remains a captivating oddity from the Golden Age of animation, a singular piece that still has tremendous power to surprise and perturb.

Peace On Earth unfolds in a society populated by anthropomorphic squirrels and rabbits, and boasts the most deceptively innocuous of set-ups - a grandfather squirrel (voice of Mel Blanc) has gone to visit his grandchildren on a snowy Yuletide evening, and explains to them the origins of one of their society's most prominent festive traditions: saying "Peace on Earth, good will to men." It's indicated that this is customary because a group of carollers are heard chanting it over and over, and then Grandpa himself goes and says it incessantly - so much so that, within the first two minutes of the film, you'll be a mite weary of hearing those words. The fluffiness of some of the short's establishing moments (Grandpa also sits on a needled ball of yarn for seemingly no other reason than to add a dash of filler slapstick to a film that otherwise has no use for it) is counterbalanced by the discordantly grim turn taken by the three minute mark, although it would misleading to suggest that this comes out of nowhere. From the start there are tinges of darkness - the film wastes little time in cluing us in that the animals' warm and gentle society was built upon the rubble of a much crueller one. The opening images show a wrecked chapel and an array of abandoned weaponry, set (as incongruously as anything else in this short) to a calming rendition of "Hark The Herald Angels Sing", as we span across the winter landscape and finally settle upon the array of miniature houses inhabited by our friendly protagonists - constructed, somewhat troublingly, from combat helmets. Any sense of lingering complacency is shattered when one of the young squirrels goes and asks the bombshell question: "What are men?" As it turns out, "What were men?" would be much more pertinent phrasing, because as Grandpa Squirrel states upfront, humans have long disappeared from this world, although their extinction was a recent enough occurrence that he has vague personal memories of how it came about. As he recounts the story to his grandchildren, we find ourselves plucked from the safety of the animals' world, in which a pair of misplaced knitting needles represent the absolute peak of hostility, and plunged directly into the heart of the apocalypse, a minefield of relentless carnage populated by murky human figures who lurch about with bayonets, their facial features buried beneath the deadpan gaze of gas mask lenses. Even with the early set-up, the shift is startling, a contrast furthered by the use of rotoscoping for the human sequences, giving their movements an intensity and a realism that, conversely, feels so far removed from the grounding of those cuddly, Disneyesque squirrels as to play like the kind of nightmarish monstrosity that, in their world, could only exist in the most unsettled of fever dreams.

Humans died out, simply put, because warfare came so naturally to them that they couldn't help blowing themselves off the face of the planet. There was usually a human war waging about something or other, and for the most arbitrary of reasons (apparently there were wars between the flat-footed and the buck-toothed, and between vegetarians and meat eaters), but one day they got themselves into a particularly cataclysmic squabble, with bombs and artillery flying in all directions and obliterating everything in their path. This went on until there were only two men left, and they too persisted in battling it out until the end, both mortally wounding one another and sealing the fate of their species (of course, by this point the human race would have been doomed anyway, since both of these would-be survivors are assumed to be male, but y'know, symbolism). The Earth was left to be reclaimed by the natural world, but the animals were unsure about adapting and surviving in the war-torn landscape. A group of them (including our grandpa squirrel, who was a juvenile at the time) wandered into the remains of a church, where they found an owl gazing contemplatively at the page of an opened Bible. The young squirrel approached the owl and asked him what is written on the page in question; the owl read out: "Thou shalt not kill."  The owl then flicked through the pages and stumbled upon a random passage, "Ye shall rebuild the old wastes", which inspired the animals to resurrect the fallen human civilisation, with the intention that, this time around, it be dedicated to the values of peace and cooperation. At least three generations in, and the animals have remained true to their aim; we return to the present day, with Grandpa rounding off his history lesson by telling his young charges that this is why they make such a point of saying, "Peace on Earth, good will to men." By the end of the film, though, I remain somewhat puzzled by the full significance of the of the phrase to the animals' post-apocalyptic culture - while the "Peace on Earth" part is self-explanatory, the "Good will to men" portion is, as one of the squirrel children flags up, an obsolete curiosity, given that there are no humans left to wish good will upon. The squirrels' world is comprised heavily of artefacts borrowed from the world that came before, but one wonders why they haven't modified this particular term to better serve their own needs within the present. Unless, of course, these animals appreciate a generous serving of sarcasm with their Yuletide cheer.

Peace On Earth debuted on December 9th 1939. To put that into historic context, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland just three months prior, marking the beginning of World War II in Europe, although America was still neutral at this point, and the short reflects the trepidation of a world about to be plunged (once again) into omnipresent warfare. As a commentary on that specific conflict, there's an argument to be made that some of the film's well-intentioned sentiments now seem quite naive - in particular, the suggestion that these squabbles invariably came down to petty differences, in which both sides were equally culpable (questionable in a scenario where one side advocated genocide). And yet the basic message is so powerful, and so evergreen, that it's difficult to disagree with its lamentations on the tremendous human cost of war, and the elusiveness of peace among a species that values it as highly desirable but seems so much more inclined toward division and destruction. Besides, there are multiple regards in which Peace On Earth seems positively ahead of its time. It preceded the creation of Oppenheimer's deadly toy, which made the possibility of humankind wiping itself out through warfare frighteningly plausible. Its depiction of humankind as a destructive force that misuses technology, and a scarred nature attempting to heal itself in the aftermath of its inevitable collapse, resonates as much today for its ecological implications as for its explicitly anti-war message. And its reminders of the futility in attempting to divide the world into camps comprised of "us" and "them", and in defining our neighbours according to superficial differences, as opposed to the common ground we certainly share, seem as bitingly relevant today in the age of social media.

There is an unmistakable religious undercurrent to Peace On Earth, with the owl endorsing the Bible as a "mighty good book of rules", although this is implemented in a much less heavy-handed fashion than in its remake Good Will To Men - to my atheist sensibilities, it plays less like proselytising than an underscoring of the importance of heeding one's own words. Hence the significance of the short's pivotal phrase - "Peace on Earth, good will to men" is a familiar festive saying in our own world too, so much so that's easy to regurgitate the words without giving any real consideration to their meaning. We might find our patience tried by how frequently the animals say it in the earlier portions of Peace On Earth, but following our distressing excursion through wartime we're left with a greater appreciation for their refusal to take their state of harmony for granted. The challenge Harman appears to have been extending to audiences in 1939 is to contemplate what those words actually meant to them, in light of what was then going on in the world around. Did they have any significance at all on an Earth that was already in the process of being violently cleaved by bombshell and artillery?

Peace On Earth bows out with this final puzzle - is it an optimistic film or not? It leaves us with a hopeful vision of a world in which conflict has been eradicated and innocence reborn, in the form of the benign forest animals; in that regard, it is a much more upbeat short than Joan and Peter Foldes' 1956 apocalyptic animation A Short Vision, in which the natural world perishes along with the human world and a prospective rebirthing immediately fails. The fact that the animals choose to model their new society on the obliterated human civilisation likewise suggests the vindication and survival of the human world, however vicariously - Harman expresses hope that it still has the potential to be a force of benevolence over destruction. There is, nevertheless, something extraordinarily harrowing about the closing frames of Peace On Earth, which show the mother squirrel rocking her children to the gentle lullaby of "Sleep in heavenly peace..." It is a utopia that Harman fears may be forever beyond us due to something fundamentally within our nature, inaccessible to those realistic human soldiers and attainable only within the fantasy image of the society of anthropomorphic squirrels. The mother squirrel's final reassurances seem at once touchingly pure and quietly taunting; as much as we might identify with those cartoon rodents, in wanting our children to sleep soundly in a world freed from conflict and fear, there's little getting around the fact that we are the disturbance in this particular scenario. The happy ending, when it comes, is facilitated explicitly by our own exclusion, and that's not a thought likely to leave us at peace with ourselves.