Simple and effective, even when it stumbles, this nuclear cautionary uses hand-drawn animation with a flat palette to tell its story of ‘little’ people calmly living thru quiet desperation in the aftermath of world destruction from an atomic bombing. Our retired couple (voiced by Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills, they’re the entire cast), long moved from the city to a small house in the country. With the coming crisis announced on radio and in the paper, the husband attempts to follow all the advise in official government pamphlets (a step and a half beyond the old ‘duck and cover’ instructions) and hold out till service is restored. Totally on their own, without a soul to turn to, media to inform, power or water; between diminishing resources and advancing radiation poisoning, the outcome is inevitable. Director Jimmy T. Murakami changes gears during some dream sequences with a more fluid/fantastic style, but mostly keeps things to a Lake District/watercolor æsthetic that turns gray & empty as time passes. The film's main trouble stems from the ingrained British condescension toward the unsophisticated middle-class, presumably coming from writer Raymond Briggs, who makes the husband a docile follower of rules, and the wife not so much down to earth as slow on the uptake. (Of course, thinking that a nice cup of tea can fix anything isn’t too far off the mark!) More interesting today as a socio-political take on the times (trendy enough to get David Bowie to do the title track) than as film, but it gets by.
DOUBLE-BILL: For real artistic engagement with the folly of war and destruction in animated form from this period, there’s the unique style of cartoonist/animator R.O. Blechman with a resoundingly successful version of Igor Stravinsky’s THE SOLDIER’S TALE/’84 (Max von Sydow, Andre Gregory, Serge Gainsbourg among the vocal cast) which (alas) only seems to be currently available in a version cut in running time and aspect ratio.
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