In 2021, Sean Ono Lennon was looking for a way to make a music video for one of his parents’ signature songs and felt creatively stuck – until he had a meeting with former Pixar animator Dave Mullins. The song, 1971 Merry Christmas (the war is over), is probably the most popular piece of music that John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote as a couple. But in addition to reliably appearing on playlists around the world every Christmas, Merry Christmas (the war is over) it’s also an anthem of peace, and Sean wanted to reintroduce the song’s message. The song “seemed like it deserved some kind of play to help spread it to another generation,” says Lennon. The only problem was that every music video idea seemed to trivialize it. “It almost seemed silly,” says Lennon. “Like some kind of Hallmark. What are we going to show, a family sitting around a campfire? It needed a real narrative.”
Lennon was intrigued by this problem when a friend introduced him to Mullins, who had directed the 2017 Oscar-nominated Pixar short film. Louanimated in features including Looking for Nemo It is Above and began working as creative director for a new Los Angeles-based animation studio called ElectroLeague in 2020. On Zoom, Lennon and Mullins began talking about historical wars and the Christmas truce between British and German soldiers during WWI. World Cup, when the two sides stopped fighting during the holiday and played some impromptu football matches.
That conversation was a eureka moment. Two years later, and with the fortuitous involvement of the Beatles’ unofficial modern chronicler Peter Jackson, Mullins wrote and directed an ambitious 11-minute animated film about a game of chess played across enemy lines with the help of a heroic pigeon. mail. The film, The war is over! Inspired by the music of John and Yokoit quietly had an Oscar qualifier 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: Come Back for Disney+ and made a music video for the Beatles song Now and then, 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 an animated short film would take 12 to 14 months to make and that there was a good chance the war in Ukraine would be resolved by the time it was over. 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! was funded by a patchwork of independent sponsors, including Lennon and Ono, who are both executive producers, as well as Mullins and ElectroLeague producer and CEO Brad Booker. Jackson’s New Zealand-based visual effects company WetaFX participated via sweat equity – Weta began an expansion into animation and the short film provided a timely learning opportunity for its artists. North Carolina-based Epic Games also provided some funding, after seeing the creative way the filmmakers were using its Unreal game engine.
Visually, the film’s style was inspired by artists such as Norman Rockwell and early 20th century illustrator JC Leyendecker, as well as stylized World War I propaganda posters. For Weta artists, working on this type of animation presented new creative challenges. “They won Oscar after Oscar for the beautiful photoreal stuff they did,” says Mullins. “But for them to take their cues from these very impressionistic paintings was a big leap.”
Despite the stylized visuals, the filmmakers sought realism in the tone of war – a fictional tone – something they wouldn’t have achieved if they were making the film at a major animation studio, says Mullins. “We didn’t have a bunch of people trying to mess with our history,” he says. “We were pretty much independent filmmakers and I’m not sure any other studio would have made this film. We show the real violence of war.”
The film ends with Lennon and Ono’s song in the credits, but the story itself unfolds against a score written by 15-time Oscar nominee Thomas Newman, who wrote the music for films such as Shawshank Redemption, WALL-E It is Sky fall, but I had never made a short film. “I always worried – the best thing about the film is that we had amazing music. And the worst thing about the movie is that we had incredible music,” says Mullins. “It was so iconic, and how do you participate in that? How do you make it fit? In some of those early conversations with Tom, I said, ‘Do we want to do something where we take some notes from the song and put them into the score?’ He’s like, ‘No, no, no. Don’t apologize for the music. I’m like, ‘Well, it’s going to be kind of a left turn.’ He said, ‘Turn left.’”
Over the past few weeks, Booker and Mullins have been pitching the film to studios, hoping to find a home in front of a feature film or on a streamer. It was well received, but has not yet found a distributor.
The film’s timeliness is undeniable, but also, for Lennon, disturbing. “For me, it’s very sad that my parents’ message of peace and love is still relevant to this day,” he says. “It seems like such ancient history.” He is also aware that even something as seemingly universal as a call for peace could have a bad outcome in 2023. “Some people are very sensitive to this message of peace today,” says Lennon. “They feel like it’s 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 it seems very naive. It’s something I was raised to believe in and still believe in.”
