It’s 1986. Jim and Hilda Bloggs, an elderly couple in Sussex, hear on the wireless that the Soviet–Afghan conflict is turning rotten; Within a few days, the Cold War will be thermonuclear-hot. They aren’t worried. They have a nuke shelter and a government-issued pamphlet. They lived through the Blitz and will live through this.

Alarms scream, and megatons of white death flash down from the sky. Jim and Hilda survive the bombing and wish they hadn’t—they emerge from their shelter in a shattered, unrecognizable landscape. Everything is ash; foliage-stripped trees stand like skeletal sentinels; and the sun is as grubby-dull as a coin tumbled around in a pocket. The air cannot be breathed, the water cannot be drunk, and there’s no word from the government about what happens next.

Jim and Hilda slowly die from radiation sickness, in one of the most harrowing sequences I’ve ever seen in an animated film. Stiff upper lip is useless. Keep Calm and Carry On is useless. Their preparation was for nothing: they’ve cheated death only to be packed into a coffin and buried alive anyway. As they succumb to ARDS their minds regress to the level of children, and at the end they’re reduced to huddling inside paper sacks, still waiting for grown-ups to save them. Jim tries to say the Lord’s Prayer, but cannot remember the words.

“Propaganda” is the word for When the Wind Blows. Not in the sense that it’s lying, necessarily (I do have comments about the scientific and geopolitical accuracy of some of the movie, and I’ll make them soon), but it’s supposed to sway you toward the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which writer Raymond Briggs personally supported.

Unlike Mick Jackson’s Threads (which was pure blunt-force shock against the limbic system), When the Wind Blows is pointedly satirical, even humorously so. Its real target isn’t nukes but British complacency, enabled by government pamphlets such as Protect and Survive. You can view the handbook Jim follows here (see also EP Thompson’s retaliatory Protest and Survive.)

In the movie’s view, it is irresponsible for the government to tell people they can survive a nuclear holocaust by daubing their windowpanes in emulsive paint. Nukes are a problem twenty levels above our pay grade: an enormous ever-widening death-gyre that even world leaders cannot control, let alone two pensioners in Sussex. Things like malice and evil no longer apply: Thatcher and Reagan and Gorbachev don’t want everyone to die, but as Chernobyl demonstrated it’s the nature of any system—political, social, or mechanical—to degrade and finally fail. At the peak of the missile buildup, multiple gigatons of TNT were ready to be launched across oceans. Whether the button was pushed deliberately or accidentally, the outcome remains the same. Grass dies when elephants fight, but it also dies when an elephant trips and falls. Jim and Hilda are grass.

I discovered When the Wind Blows through David Bowie. He composed the lovely opening song, which is dated in some ways (the dead slap of the snare drum becomes an irritance) but remains one of his greatest works from the period. The chorus soars (F major -> A#/F major), and then starts to writhe in pain (an out-of-key F diminished), like a bird flying into a cloud of poison gas.

Bowie’s previous act of Musically Assured Destruction was “Fantastic Voyage”, which he wrote in 1979 and featured as the lead track on the Lodger album. Its lyric suggests (echoing Dr Strangelove) that the people in charge of the nuclear stockpile are bugfuck crazy, and will someday end the world because of egotistical and psychosexual impulses. When the government tells us to remain calm, they are asking us to a standard that they can never meet themselves. As with many anti-nuke talking points, this might not be fair or accurate, but it’s understandable. One feels for people in the 80s, who must have been sure they would never live to grow old (or up). “I’ll never say anything nice again / How can I?”

The film’s emotional punch comes from the gentle pastoral setting, and the way the Bloggses keep trying to continue their old lives, even when it’s clearly impossible. This is just another trap, like the government pamphlets. The Bloggs are so lulled to sleep by their idyllic lifestyle that they can’t cope when things change. They still go about their routine, deluding themselves that nothing’s different (the postman hasn’t been? Well, obviously he must have lots of important war mail to deliver. The power is off? Well, Britain needs to conserve electricity for the war effort… etc, etc.)

They do foolish things, because that’s what people do. Hilda insists on exposing herself to radiation so she can clean the house. Jim autistically chatters away, repeating rubbish he’s heard on government broadcasts (“Difficulties will be experienced throughout the duration of the emergency period. Normality will only be assumed after the cessation of hostilities!”) and fantasizes about being called up to service. All of their behavior has the same root: they are trying to assert control over a situation that can’t be controlled by anyone.

Jim and Hilda are different, but they both live in a world made of memories. They still half-believe that Churchill is Prime Minister, and the Russians are commanded by Stalin (when they try to remember who the current set of leaders are, they can’t quite do it). They have fond memories of the London Blitz. What’s left unspoken is that they were children when it happened, and presumably their parents shielded them from the worst of the horrors. As Richard Adams pointed out in Watership Down, when someone says “I enjoy the winter”, they actually mean they enjoy being protected from the winter—they like warm food and roaring fires and so on. Find a poor man with holes in his shoes, and ask him what he thinks about the winter.

Their characters are richly painted, and flaws emerge. In a devastating moment, Jim (who until now was as annoyingly pleasant as Postman Pat) calls his wife a “bitch” when she won’t obey an instruction. Their relationship is never the same after that. Hilda has an anti-Semitic streak. Jim mentions that one of her parents was part-Jewish, and she angrily denies it. Again, the illusions are crumbling, whether they admit it or not. They aren’t as safe as they think, and they also aren’t as kind and heroic as they think.

It’s the most agitated of agitprop. It’s not a fun movie to watch, but it’s emotionally moving. If the studio had included a CND badge with the VHS release, likely many viewers would have worn it.

And yet…there’s a trope called Strawman Has a Point, where a fiction writer clearly believes that one point of view is bad, and tries hard to destroy it…but fails. The “bad” viewpoint is resilient enough to survive the sledging, and in fact, we might even regard it as true, despite the writer’s intent. As Ebert once observed, it’s hard to cheer for the hero when the villain is the one who’s making sense.

When the Wind Blows has a little of that. It’s a movie made with passion and moral fury, but I’m not sure it scores the points it thinks its scoring. It wants us to hate the idiotic government, and their silly pamphlets. But even in the movie, those pamphlets kinda…worked? Jim and Hilda survive the bombing because of them! What more could you ask for? Granted, their lives afterward aren’t particularly comfortable, but at least they get to spend a few more days in each other’s company. And if they’d been further away from the epicenter (or “hypocenter”, as Jim calls it) they would probably have recovered.

It’s like those insufferable Redditors who ridicule those 1950s “Duck and Cover” educational films. “Haw haw, they actually thought hiding under a desk will save you from a nuclear bomb!” It will, you dense fucks. As per Alex Wellerstein’s Nuke Map, the overpressure waves of a 1 Mt Minuteman will shatter glass at a range of up to 19.8km. Hiding under a desk stops that glass from getting in your eyes. Broken glass in eyeballs is bad! No broken glass in eyeballs is good! Do you get it?

The devastation of nuclear war is highly overstated in popular media. While Threads predicted a Mad Max-style lawless wasteland, and Dr Strangelove predicted an uninhabitable planet. There is no excuse for this. In 1979, the OTA simulated various nuclear attacks on cities such as Detroit and Leningrad. For a one-Mt explosion directly above an urban center: they calculated a 95% survival rate within the 5 psi cone. At Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there were wooden shelters still standing barely 100 yards from the epicenter! “Nuclear winter” is now regarded as probably a fantasy, driven by flawed assumptions. Dust is heavier than air, and falls over time. Likewise, most of the fallout from a nuclear war would only be lethally radioactive for about a week. So long as they didn’t get dust on their skin, the Bloggs will be fine. Their biggest challenge would be to find a source of unpolluted water. Note the way the film stacks the deck against them by making them sole survivors, and fairly unimaginative ones at that—why don’t they commandeer a car, and check out some neighboring villages?

Additionally, we do not know what a full-scale nuclear war would look like. We are working from zero data points, so we can’t say “oh, this would definitely happen”. Perhaps a limited engagement would be possible. We don’t know. “If one missile is launched, everyone on the planet dies” is alarmist and ill-supported by the data (of which there is none). The CND, in their effort to counter government misinformation, troweled on misinformation very deep themselves. Truly, it’s proof of the adage that reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence.

Opponents of MAD have to confront the reality that the doctrine seems to have worked. After ninety years, only two bombs have been dropped in anger. What can we take from that? Did we just get lucky? Granted, there were some close calls—Vasily Arkhipov being the closest. But there are many other cases of nuclear deterrence successfully deterring. Kennedy almost launched a ground invasion of Cuba, under great pressure from his military advisors. But he didn’t. Why not? He knew that Cuba was defended with tactical nukes.

Moving on, what’s actually happening in the film?

The Russians in the movie are likely firing R-36MUTTKh ICBMs at Great Britain, with five-megaton warheads. Such was their arsenal at the time. Their first targets would have been UK Trident missile bases like HMNB Clyde and AWE Aldermaston. This is the foremost goal of any nuclear strike—to erase the mutual from of mutually assured destruction. Secondary targets would be British military bases such as Portsmouth, Devonport, and Aldershot. Tertiary targets would be British industrial centers such as London. To be blunt, I do not see why Russia is trying to nuke Shitsplat Village, Essex. ICBMs are your crown jewels. Worth more than gold. Why waste them on strategically worthless targets? Are they trying to kill Postman Pat? These dramatic choices make little sense, and take the film deeper into the realm of fantasy.

In short, the film (like Threads before it) is highly unreliable on factual issues. It regards itself as grimly realistic, an antidote to a Pollyannaish government, but it’s largely a tissue of fantasy. If anything, Protect and Survive is probably far better.

I am fascinated by When the Wind Blows as a cultural artifact. It is not made to be enjoyed, but to open your eyes. It opens them too far, severing your optical nerve in the process. Yet it’s still an acute psychological portrayal of two people pushed to the edge, and then pushed off.

We shouldn’t be complacent, though. I’m with Raymond Briggs there. Here’s Winston Churchill, writing to us from a distance of over a century. Of all the words ever written on any tombstone, the deepest might be “No One Would Do Such Things”.

“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”

Nuclear war might not play out as When the Wind Blows thinks it will, but I don’t doubt it’s nailed the human (non-)response dead on. What will we do when “fire and murder” leaps out of the darkness? Continue. We’ll keep doing what we’ve always done, even at the point of extinction. It’s the British way, after all. Keep Calm and Carry On. Keep Calm and Carrion.

This movie isn’t all bad, but it needed at least five million dollars more and twenty “development meetings” fewer to really cook. It has a great villain, Robin Williams doing a dry run for his Aladdin Genie character, and a winning ecological message. But it looks cheap at times and has horrifying creative choices that I assume 20th Century Fox forced on the filmmakers at gunpoint.

The worst part is Zak, the 90s ‘tude hero. For those who don’t understand or remember, “90s ‘tude” is where a piece of media would try to appeal to Generation X but in a phony and corporate way. Have you seen The Simpsons episode where the Itchy and Scratchy Show is losing ratings, so they add a dog with sunglasses? A dog who skateboards, wails on guitar, and says stuff like “remember, kids, always recycle…to the extreme!“? 90s ‘tude is what they’re mocking. It is so heavily parodied that it’s hard to believe it once existed everywhere, unironically. I’d argue the grunge/alt movement itself died because it had been Borg-assimilated by lame, toothless corporatism.

Zak is 90s ‘tude to the extreme! He has a Walkman, a feathered ‘do, and like the first line out of his mouth is “Don’t have a cow. Sheesh!” He’s an utter joke, and when I realized he wasn’t comic relief but the male lead I wanted to tie a rope around my fucking neck.

He’s marking trees for logging in a rainforest when he’s shrunk by the fairy Krysta, who’s never even seen a human dude before, let alone one so radical and tubular. From then on, the plot’s a bog-standard “liar revealed” thing where you tap your fingers impatiently, waiting for Krysta to discover that Zak is there to destroy the rainforest so she can freak out and break up with him but by that point he’s had a change of heart and says he’s sorry but it’s too late because she hates him now but then the big threat arrives and Zak redeems himself by stopping it and then the movie ends and then you clip your toenails and then you notice a weird crusty yellow growth on one of them and you Google what does it mean when your toenail

The plot is perhaps too simple. It’s like they read Save the Cat! or some other screenwriting book and tried to pack a lot of formula characters into a plot that didn’t have room for them. The film has multiple sets of villains whose motives are just “destroy the rainforest”. Human loggers are busy cutting down trees (not noticing that one of their own has been shrunk to three inches in height) when they accidentally free the spirit of Hexxus, a sentient smog cloud that the fairies once imprisoned inside a bottle tree. He takes over their operation and tells them to…continue cutting down trees. Hard sell, but okay.

But it doesn’t matter, because Hexxus is voiced by Tim Curry, who just carries the entire film on his shoulders from that point on. He’s a wonderful character actor and this is one of his flagship performances: a one man clinic on how to turn crap into gold. Even the (otherwise mediocre) animation rallies when Hexxus is on the screen, giving him a sticky, tarlike quality that’s viscerally repulsive. The character and performance is so great it’s almost a detriment to the movie, because it shows how hollow most of the rest of it is.

FernGully has an advanced case of what I call Tim Curry Syphilis. He enhances films (just as the treponema pallidum bacterium is supposed to enhance artistic output) but also kinda causes them to die at the same time. He steals the show, and almost consumes their essence: you don’t care about the rest of the movie, you only want more Tim Curry. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is Patient Zero. Early-stage Tim Curry Syphilis can be observed in Captain Planet and the Planeteers and The Wild Thornberries. We witness the disease’s progression in Legend and The Muppets: Treasure Island. Don Bluth’s The Pebble and the Penguin is dead of Tim Curry Syphilis.

The animation is occasionally really good. The parts where Crysta and Zak are exploring look fantastic.

As a kid I was obsessed with the Leveler (the loggers’ machine), for reasons I cannot explain. The huge arms? The fact that its cockpit is an icosahedron? I don’t know. It’s just cool.

I suspect I love the Leveler because it’s insane. It’s this ridiculous monster truck-looking abomination that makes no sense—why would a machine for cutting down trees be armor-plated like a Panzer tank? Why does it have spiked caterpillar treads that look like a Goth chick’s belt? How would you get it around obstacles like ditches or creeks, and wouldn’t it be smarter to break up the Leveler’s functions among several smaller vehicles (so that a breakdown doesn’t cripple your whole operation?). There’s no reason for the Leveler to exist, but here we are. I share Tim Curry’s appreciation for this fabulous metal panther. What a beautiful machine they have provided!

The part at the end (where Hexxus assumes his true form) is strongly derived from the ending sequence of Fantasia, and works both as a homage and on its own terms. Robin Williams plays a deranged bat. Cheech and Chong do something. Tone-Loc plays a horny goanna who sounds like he wants to fuck Zak instead of eating him. Note that in “Funky Cold Medina”, he says “it’s the eighties, and Tone is down with the ladies!”, implying that in other decades (such as the nineties) he might gay, or at least bisexual. I think I’ll skip the deleted scenes on the DVD.

Moving along, I’m just too old to handle Zak’s radical gnarliness, and Crysta is pretty forgettable. There are two human loggers, one of whom is fat and is called “Tone” by the other. This movie will give him something to discuss with his therapist, Dr Melfi. Why is the movie set in Australia when all of the characters are so clearly American?

I had it in my mind that FernGully was made in Australia. It wasn’t. Australia essentially had no animation industry in the mid 90s, aside from Yoram Gross Films (which made cheap TV shows such as Dot the Kangaroo and Blinky Bill, with animated characters and non-animated backgrounds), Burbank Animation Studios (who had devolved into making shoddy “mockbuster” ripoffs of Disney films), and truly obscure novelties such as Go To Hell!!, a bizarre curio that remains one of the only feature-length animated films created by a single person.

There was certainly no studio capable of a Disney-sized production (or Disney-quality animation) within Australia. The film was financed by the Australian company FAI Films, but all creative personnel and staff appear to have been American (aside from Diane Young, who wrote books that FernGully was based on). Maybe this explains why characters call Fern Gully “the jungle” instead of “the bush”.

While it’s not entirely a failure, FernGully is one of those movies where the main story is absolutely boring, but the peripheral stuff is absolutely captivating. There are a lot of films like that. So far as I’m concerned, the movie’s real cast is Tim Curry, Robin Williams, and the Leveler.

Habfürdö is unique. I’ve never seen a film like it.

An experimental animated Eastern Bloc neo-constructivist musical romantic soap opera (ugh, one of those), it was directed by György Kovásznai, produced by Budapest’s Pannónia Filmstúdió, and watched by apparently no-one. Its commercial failure in 1980 dealt a crippling blow to adult animation in Hungary, but now it’s a beloved curio for fans of the bizarre. If you’ve seen Les Maîtres du temps and Fehérlófia and want to delve further into Hungarian animation, consider cleaning yourself off with a bubble bath.

The film’s most striking aspect is its animation style: it doesn’t have one. The action rictus-spasms at 24 fps from Hergé-style Ligne claire to Dali-style surrealism to Picasso-style cubism to scrapbook collages to real-life footage. Anything goes, and it’s probably for the best that most of the film happens inside one room. Visual comprehensibility is in short supply and we need all the visual aids we can get.

Habfürdö‘s characters slip and squirm through poses like amoebas jolted with electricity. They exist in permanent flux, morphing to reflect their emotions (this gives us a window into what they’re actually thinking; as opposed to their dialog, which is largely a tissue of self-deceptive bullshit.)

Admittedly, “characters changing shape to reflect their emotions” is the oldest trick in the book, but I’ve never seen it done to the extent that Habfürdö does it. In animation, “off-model” refers to when a character deviates from a standard model sheet. Habfurdo’s characters have no model to be “off” from.

What about the story?

The plot could fit on a postcard. Zoltan Mohai, an preening, pretentious “artist”, has cold feet on his wedding day. He hides from the bride at the house of a medical student, whom he burdens with breaking the news that the wedding is cancelled.

I’m not sure why it’s called Bubble Bath (aside from the fact that Zsolt briefly hides inside one). Maybe it’s a clue to the nature of the social relations on the screen. These are vain, silly people living comfortable middle-class lives. People inside bubbles, in other words, one needle-prick away from existential extinction. And although the scenario generates complications (the jilted bride misunderstands what’s happening, and Anna begins having feelings for this preening stranger herself), it’s ultimately all nonsense, a churned-up froth that dissolves on contact with reality.

Technically, Habfurdo is an “idiot plot”—the whole situation would be defused if these people would have one conversation. But the fact is, they can’t. They refuse to confront who they are, and what they actually want.

Why does Zsolt want to escape his marriage to Klára Horváth? Mainly because of a perceived insult from her family. Her mother or someone once referred to him as a “window dresser”, which wounds his pride (he’s a serious artiste!). Yet…it’s true that he’s a window dresser. When he barges in through Anna Parádi’s front door, that’s how he introduces himself! He’s locked in a roomful of mirrors, despising his own reflection.

Likewise, Klára’s marriage-obsession (and sexual promiscuity) come from a desire to project a certain self-image to her social circle. She gloats that the “old maids” at the hospital where she works at are jealous of her debutante’s lifestyle. In the end, she’s making decisions because of what other people think. Left to her own devices, she’ll construct a relationship that’s flawless from the outside and miserable to the ones trapped inside it.

Economist John Maynard Keynes once imagined a beauty contest where women are judged by a panel. The twist: each of the judges is rewarded if their chosen woman is the overall winner. This scenario (which Keynes applied to the stock market) would quickly devolve into farce. The judges would ignore their own preferences, and would only think of of what the other judges prefer. It wouldn’t be a contest of beautiful women, it would be a contest of judges who are judging beautiful women. Today, we call that sort of problem Goodhart’s Law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful as a measure. Klára doesn’t care about her own happiness. She only cares that the “judges” (her social peers) think she’s happy.

Habfürdö isn’t a character study. There is no effort at psychological realism. Characters are written the way they are drawn: as ludicrous, bizarre freaks. Everything they do is abhorrently strange, yet we see the social parallels.

The dirty secret behind animation (even “realistic” animation) is that it’s essentially a bag of tricks. Think of the “Milt Kahl head swaggle”. When have you ever seen this gesture in real life? Or the Dreamworks Face. If you saw a real person make that expression, you’d assume they were suffering a stroke. But when those things appear in an animated world, we assign meaning to them. (head swaggle = character has smug confidence, Dreamworks face = character is sassy and full of ‘TUDE and also you should probably skip this movie). They are visual shorthand. They don’t depict real life, they hint at it.

Habfürdö’s characters are written in the same stylized way: unrealistic on the face of things, but it nudges your mind to toward topics that are too realistic for comfort. It’s the old divide of how you can be truthful without exactly being factual. More than anything, Habfürdö is a truthful film. Bubbles might seem insubstantial, but they hint at a powerful chemical reaction. Ignore them at your peril.

You soon discern that the point of the movie isn’t these characters, it’s modernity, and urbanism, and the pressures faced by men and women who live like termites in gray apartment complexes. I’m sure that it would make more sense to someone raised in the land of “Ghoulash communism”. I got the sense that much of the film was flying over my head.

But Habfürdö mostly doesn’t take itself seriously. The plot is casually constructed. A fourth character is introduced, a boxer called Nandi. He is absolutely pointless. He ends up getting drunk and passing out.

And sometimes the movie’s experimental nature excuses its excesses. The film begins with a wildly overambitious 3D panning shot over medical student Anna Parádi’s apartment. In a Disney movie, it would have looked inexcusably sloppy. In the context of Habfürdö’s abstract style, it works.

Habfurdo is an odd beast. Even now, I’m not sure I have a handle on what it’s trying to do. Habfürdö‘s visuals have a restless joy that infects the viewer. It makes me happy. I think that’s enough!