Good Will to Men

Hugh Harman's quintessential masterpiece, Peace on Earth, this is not, but Good Will To Men still marks a fascinating contrast from all of the Tom & Jerry cartoons that Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera were making at the time. As this short is set up in a church with a choir director mouse recapping the downfall of mankind to his singers, much of the similar thrilling hooks are retold but with higher production qualities and bigger effects work. Sometimes, the flashbacks can go a bit all over the place, but the resolution of animals rebuilding civilization after all the destruction remains intact nonetheless.

Really, the cartoon's biggest issue is that it doesn't offer much that the original short already didn't do better, and the ending feels too wrapped up in pro American jingoism when the church setting becomes more prominent than you'd think. That all being said, it's admirable that Hanna & Barbera tackled this remake in general since they were the only ones who could do so with the amount of respect and sincerity needed for a project like this. For what it's worth, it's a decent enough retelling of a great short film that might have benefited from a followup instead of a general remake. Check it out if you're interested this Christmas.

This animated film is proof that the team of Hanna-Barbera could produce films with decent frame-rates and nice animation. This is because before they left MGM, the team was responsible for some wonderfully animated Tom & Jerry cartoons. Then, when the studio shut down its animation department (farming the work out to, of all places, Czechoslovakia), the two needed work and could not afford to make better cartoons. So, instead of the usual 24 frames per second, they produced what looked like slide-shots because so few cells were used and many were repeated. So, animation quality-wise, "Good Will to Men" was nice--not as nice as the best of Hanna-Barbera from the late 40s--but close.

As for the story, well, that's a different story. Some may love its risky anti-nuclear message--as the animals recount how mankind wiped itself out with all of their wars. And, for historical reasons, it is an interesting curio from the Cold War. But, it's also INCREDIBLY preachy. On a preachiness scale from 1 to 10, I'd give this one a 47. It is SO preachy about world peace that it actually made me cringe. Nicely animated but awful.

Please note that most reviewers adored it--one calling it 'the Citizen Kane of cartoon shorts', though at least bigtommyboy agreed with me...for what it's worth. It could just be that I am just too cynical for my own good.

A remake of 'Peace on Earth', a parable of mice, men, and the futility of war, 'Good Will To Men' starts with a mouse choir singing for Christmas. The word 'men' appears in the carol, and the mice start asking questions about what men were.

Slowly we realise that men destroyed themselves and all their towns and cities by wars, bombs, and guns. We see footage of men crawling across trenches and fields, setting off machine guns, dropping mushroom bombs on cities.

Finally the cartoon returns to the mice, frightened but wise in their ruined church, with the wise old owl poring over the Bible, a 'good book of rules'.

Well-drawn and tightly-plotted, this cartoon was a worthy Oscar nominee and is still effective after all these years.

This cartoon is the result of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera deciding to revisit the theme explored in another cartoon, Peace on Earth, done in 1939. Both cartoons are excellent ststements and are still all-too relevant today. Exploring weighty concepts-war, hatred and destruction-both are equally effective in each its own right, although Good Will to Men is seen all too rarely. An excellent effort that is sadly out-of-print. Well worth the effort to track down. Most highly recommended.

Good Will to Men (1955)

*** (out of 4)

Oscar-nominated cartoon is a remake of the Oscar-nominated 1939 short Peace on Earth. The film has a preacher mouse telling the younger mice how men destroyed the world due to war and violence. This is a pretty good cartoon, although I prefer the original version. The animation is very good as are the characters and I always like seeing cartoons in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio. It's funny to think that an innocent short like this couldn't be made today due to the religious aspects of the story.