John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (The War Is Over)” inspires the animated film
The war is over
Courtesy of Electroleague
In 2021, Sean Ono Lennon was looking for a way to create a music video for one of his parents’ iconic songs and felt creatively stuck — until he met former Pixar animator Dave Mullins. The Song, 1971 Happy birthday (the war is over)It is perhaps the most popular piece of music written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono as a couple. But in addition to reliably appearing on playlists around the world every Christmas, Happy birthday (the war is over) It is also a peace anthem, and Sean wanted to reintroduce the song’s message. Lennon says the song “felt like it deserved some sort of piece of music to help spread it to another generation.” The only problem is that every music video idea seems to diminish its importance. “I almost felt goofy,” Lennon says. “Like some kind of hallmark. What are we going to show, a family sitting around a fire? It needed a real narrative.”
Lennon was puzzling over the issue when a friend introduced him to Mullins, who had directed the 2017 Oscar-nominated Pixar short. if-Animation on features including Finding Nemo And higher He began his work as creative head of a new Los Angeles-based animation studio called Electroleague in 2020. Over Zoom, Lennon and Mullins talked about historical wars, and a Christmas truce between British and German soldiers during World War I. When the two sides stopped fighting during the holiday and played some impromptu football matches.
That conversation was a eureka moment. Two years later, with Peter Jackson, the unofficial Beatles historian, Mullins wrote and directed an ambitious 11-minute animated film about a game of chess played across enemy lines with the help of heroic carrier pigeons. The movie, The war is overquietly entered the Oscar qualifiers this fall and is now looking for a distributor.
“Sean and I are friends and he initially wanted some advice on his script,” says Jackson, who directed and produced the 2021 documentary series. The Beatles: Back for Disney+ and made a music video for the Beatles song Now and later, which was released in November. “I first heard from Sean a few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, and it was clearly an important project for him. I remember telling him that the animated short would take 12 to 14 months, and there was a very good chance that the war in Ukraine would be over by then.” Which you end up in. Here we are, and not only does the misery in Ukraine continue with no end in sight, but there is now war in Gaza.”
The war is over It was financed by a group of independent backers, including Lennon and Ono, both executive producers, as well as Mullins and producer and Electroleague CEO Brad Booker. Jackson’s New Zealand-based visual effects company, WetaFX, got involved by putting in the effort — Weta had begun expanding into animation, and the short film provided a timely educational opportunity for its artists. North Carolina-based Epic Games also provided some funding, after seeing the creative way the filmmakers used their Unreal game engine.
Visually, the film’s style is inspired by artists including Norman Rockwell and painter J.C. Leyendecker from the early 20th century, as well as stylized World War I propaganda posters. For Weta’s artists, working on this type of animation presented new creative challenges. “They won Oscar after Oscar for the very beautiful visual things they did,” Mullins says. “But for them to take their cues from these impressionist paintings to some extent, that was a huge leap.”
Despite the stylized visuals, the filmmakers aimed to bring realism to the war’s tone — a fantasy tone — something they might not have gotten away with had they been making the film at a major animation studio, Mullins says. “We didn’t have a bunch of people trying to mess with our story,” he says. “We were very much free-form filmmakers, and I’m not sure what other studio would have made this film. We’re showing the actual violence of war.”
The film closes with Lennon and Ono’s song in the credits, but the story itself unfolds against a score written by 15-time Academy Award nominee Thomas Newman, who has written the music for features such as The Shawshank Redemption, WALL-E And Sky falling, but it was never shortened. “I always worried – the best thing about the movie is that we got this great song. And the worst thing about the movie is that we got this great song,” Mullins says. “It was so creative, and how do you play into that? How do you make it fit? In some early conversations with Tom, I said, “Do we want to do something where we take some notes out of the song and put them into the score?” And he says: No, no, no. Don’t apologize for the song. I say, “Well, it’s going to be kind of a left turn.” It’s like, “Let it be a left turn.”
Over the past few weeks, Booker and Mullins have been pitching the film to studios, hoping it will find a home in front of a feature film or on a streaming device. It has been well received, but has yet to find a distributor.
The timing of the film is undeniable, but it’s also disturbing for Lennon. “For me, it’s very sad that my father’s message of peace and love is still relevant to this day,” he says. “It seems to be an old story.” He also realizes that even something as seemingly universal as a call for peace could fail in 2023. “Some people are very sensitive about that message of peace today,” Lennon says. “They feel like this is a denial of people’s pain. And I’m not criticizing anyone. I’m saying that I really believe in peaceful problem solving as a concept, even though that sounds very naive. It’s something I grew up to believe and I still believe.”
