'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.
Review of Tulips Shall Grow
