![]() “We shouldn’t actually have made that as a one-reeler, we should have made it in about three to five reels. “ was a tough one to animate and to write,” Harman told animation historian Michael Barrier in a 1973 interview. Harman himself remembered Peace On Earth as a laborious, uneven process. He’s taken criticism for copycatting contemporaries like his former boss Walt Disney-who, it should be noted, never made a one-reel as powerful and pressing as Peace On Earth-and spent much of his career bouncing from studio to studio. You won’t spend much time in the annals of animation, online or in library stacks, running across texts that give Harman the respect he deserves, instead of a hard time. This is not to say Harman’s film is flawless, although few have probably ever made that case. When all the Men are dead, the animals emerge from the wreckage and find a Bible turned to the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” “Looks like a mighty good book of rules,” Grandpa concludes, “but I guess them Men didn’t pay much attention to it.” The Intertextual Extinction “And the vegetarians began to fight the meat-eating people,” he adds, as vegan and carnivore flags wave. “When they couldn’t think of nothing else to wrangle over, the flat-footed people started shooting at the buck-toothed people,” he sardonically remembers, as Peace On Earth’s satire starts to bite. They’d no sooner get one argument settled then they’d find something else to fuss about.” “They was always a-fighting and a-feuding and a-shooting one another. Their eyes flashed and they had tremendous big snouts that curled down and fastened onto their stomachs.” The maddening tendency for human “varmints” to pointlessly exterminate each other in great wars to end all wars (a position Tolkien disbelieved) is a tragicomic mystery to Grandpa. “They walked on their hind legs, and carried terrible-looking shooting irons with knives on the end of them. “As I remember the critters, they was like monsters,” Grandpa recalls, as his shadow bleeds into a gask-masked soldier pacing through the fog of war. ![]() Though their fearsome expressions took different forms, both Tolkien and Harman’s masterpieces leapt fully formed out of the estranged madness of World War I, right before World War II came calling. as they creep off the screen like hyperreal terrors in flashing gas masks and glinting bayonets to drive each other to extinction. We can throw the One Ring of power from Jackson’s searing Mount Doom and smack Harman’s apocalyptic soldiers in their helmets. It’s worth noting that Tolkien’s harrowing experience at pointless meat-grinders like World War I’s Battle of the Somme helped give hideous shape to Middle-Earth’s terrifying monsters, according to John Garth’s excellent Tolkien and the Great War, from the walking dead Nazgul to the fell dragon Smaug. That semi-sweet Thanksgiving treat, mellowed by Orson Bean in the lead, tumbled into Bakshi’s darker vision and eventually crashed into Peter Jackson’s CGI overloads, which are currently redefining what it means to define film as animation or live-action in the first place. ![]() ![]() Bakshi’s similarly uneven but (much) more violent epic also veered between hand-drawn fantasy and rotoscoped carnage, bowing in theaters a year after Rankin/Bass’s painterly adaptation of The Hobbit landed on television. One could make the case that Peace On Earth’s prescient convergences weren’t more fully realized until Ralph Bakshi’s menacing adaptation of Lord of the Rings arrived in 1978. When scholars and geeks close their eyes and think of another example that careens so jarringly from a fairy tale lullaby to a military sci-fi heralding the end of Man, what do they find? And that’s just if they get thematic: Once they factor in Peace On Earth’s stylistic juxtapositions, they’re even more hard pressed to find an analogue, in any decade. From Harman to Bakshi to Jackson, and Back AgainĪlthough previously powerful animated explorations of war exist-most notably, Winsor McCay’s 1918 silent short The Sinking of the Lusitania-Harman’s post-WWI, pre-WWII warning of a barbaric humanity way out of control has few peers from its own turbulent period, or ours. This combination of sociopolitical and stylistic ambition makes it stand out like a sober existentialist among what passes for holiday programming, placing Peace On Earth alongside similarly daring but also underrepresented Christmas films like Richard Williams’s surreally sweet Ziggy’s Gift and Oscar-winning adaptation of A Christmas Carol. But Peace On Earth’s life-during-wartime dissonance is also brilliantly mirrored by its pioneering experimentation, as it phases between a hand-drawn animal paradise called “Peaceville” and the rotoscoped human brutality of endless battle. ![]()
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