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1942-01-26
N/A
7 min
In this Puppetoon animated short film (an Academy Award Best Short Subject, Cartoons nominee), a young Dutch couple find their idyllic countryside being overrun by unfeeling, unthinking mechanical men and machines that lay waste to everything in their path. In 1997 this film, deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
This is like a Nazi’s do the “War of the Worlds” as an idyllic Dutch scenario is suddenly trampled over by an army of metallic robots. From the ground they decimate all they encounter, they even have tanks and then from the air their aircraft drop incendiaries by the dozen. With their town in ruins, a priest is seen offering up a prayer for salvation and then something entirely mundane occurs, with startling results. I liked the style expressive style of the simple puppetry here, and it contrasts really quite effectively with a message delivered via two young and innocent children that isn’t wasted from a propagandist perspective, either. Like so many films made from countries directly impacted during WWII, this has an added potency to it and is well worth a watch.
