Tulips Shall Grow

A young boy and girl, dressed in costumes based on Dutch traditional clothes, find their idyllic, windmill-laden countryside is being over-run by unfeeling, unthinking mechanical men that lay waste to everything in their path.

Some have said this is a propaganda film, albeit a very good one. And that is true. But what is the message? Jan and Janette are not fighting the Screwballs, but merely just trying to live their happy lives. If the message is anything, it is that happiness is eternal, hardly something that would be considered a propaganda message.

I absolutely love the skill involved. I don't know if this is stop motion (though I assume it must be). Quite possibly this was the finest work of its kind in the 1940s.

This cartoon is a masterpiece. While a lot of people think George Pal was a closed-minded racist because of his "Jasper" shorts, this short proves that he clearly wasn't. Like a lot of cartoons from this time period, it was anti-Nazi propaganda, but unlike a lot of cartoons, It actually focuses on the Holocaust, rather than just winning the war, like most WWII shorts. George Pal, living in Europe throughout the 1930s, experienced the Holocaust first-hand. He wasn't Jewish, but it still upset him to see the Nazis burn down buildings and kill Jews. So, when he came to America to make more films and escape the draft, he made this. Overall, it is a great cartoon. It can still be shown on T.V. today, because the "Nazis" are really robots called the screwballs. If your a teacher, you might even show it to your history class!

This short, nominated for an Academy Award, was made by George Pal and concerns an invasion by mechanized war machines in a place obviously modeled on Holland, which was under occupation by the Nazis at the time. It is a tribute to the ability of humanity to persevere against the worst imaginable events and no only survive, but thrive. It is incorporated into The Puppetoon Movie and is a wonderful piece of work. The ending is glorious! Most highly recommended.

The story begins in Holland in happy times, until a bunch of fascist war machines come in and destroy everything. A boy and girl are in the middle of it and experience incredible sadness. The arrival of the awful machines is really the high point (though violent) as the devastate the country.

Before George Pal became famous for his sci-fi films of the 50s (such as "War of the Worlds" and "When Worlds Collide"), he established himself as a stop-motion animator. Using very small budgets and a lot of patience, he made some charming little films using wooden dolls. "Tulips Shall Grow" is one of these--and it's also a propaganda piece meant to bolster the war effort.

The film begins in happy Holland. Happy people doing happy stuff amid the happy tulips. However, soon the 'Screwballs' (made of screws and balls, actually) invade--an obvious allusion to the Nazis. Thing look bad for the happy people, tulips and windmills. However, because the Screwballs are idiots, eventually they destroyed themselves and left this merry land to the locals. It features VERY splashy sets and dolls and it's quite cute--perhaps too much for some. But very well made and worth seeing. My only reservation has nothing to do with the original film but the condition of the print I saw. It was very orange and lacked the original color. It obviously was in color but not any more.