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.

February 1st was Hungarian animator/film producer/director George Pal's birthday, so I decided to include his Oscar-nominated "Puppetoon" shorts as part of my Academy Awards marathon: he actually received 7 such nods, but I only managed to locate 4 of these films. This begins as a fairly ordinary romance between a young couple, albeit in an atypical and appealing Dutch setting, but soon adopts an allegorical stance to effectively present a standard WWII theme. In fact, the peaceful village is overrun by mechanical "Screwballs" (obviously standing in for the Nazis); despite the extensive damage done to the land, the tulip (the country's national flower) still grows and even forms a victory sign in defiance at the end!

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!

Filmmaker and puppeteer George Pal remains a severely underrated legend in the realm of fantasy filmmaking. His films have remained fairly unknown yet were still prominent accomplishments in their own right. While I haven't seen many of his Puppetoon series, Tulips Shall Grow stands out for its fascinating anti war commentary.

This might have some of the most haunting imagery I've ever seen in a seemingly cutesy wutesy fairy tale. Pal did not shy away from depicting just how deadly the affects of WWII were to the general public, especially with him being a native Hungarian.

Hard to say what would happen if this short won its Best Animated Short Oscar, but it's certainly easy to imagine how much of an impact it would've continued to have.

'Tulips Shall Grow (1942)' is a wartime 'Puppetoon' in which a young pair of lovers come under threat when an invading force of unfeeling machines starts to destroy their idyllic countryside home. The short starts out as a whimsical love story, its charming aesthetic enhancing its tried-and-tested romance. After a couple of minutes, though, it takes a hard left turn into all-out war. This sequence doesn't pull any punches; though no humans are shown to be harmed, the machines do absolutely devastate the environment and bomb every windmill in sight. The short is, in essence, an anti-war piece made in the midst of a very real war. It's not hard to see that the machines are an allegory for the Nazis and that the setting is meant to represent one of the European countries they invaded. The anti-war sentiment only really exists in the sense that we're shown how it decimates an innocent environment; it isn't any deeper than that. However, perhaps that's to be expected at a time when the war had to be won, rather than prevented. The picture is kind of unrealistic and, as such, it sort of trivialises the power of the opposing force. It's easy to see why it aims for overt optimism, though, and a message that ultimately says (as its title suggests) that peace and prosperity can in fact emerge from a war-torn world would've been incredibly pertinent at the time it was released. It's designed to tell the public that everything will be okay in the end. It's a little naïve in retrospect (after all, the filmmakers couldn't be sure the war would end in a favourable way), but it basically presents the right message at the right time if you view it in the context of its release. It's a solid effort. 6/10.