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Three years ago, Sean Ono Lennon was asked to develop a music video for the 50th anniversary of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” the 1971 protest song by his parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which has been become a rare kind of perennial: a warm Christmas tune that also doubles as an anti-war challenge, telling ordinary citizens that peace can be achieved “if you want it.”
But Lennon, 48, wasn’t interested in making a simple video. That “seemed unnecessary” for such a well-known song, he said in a recent interview. What intrigued him most was the possibility of expanding the song’s message through a narrative film. After about two years of work, that project became “The War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” directed by Dave Mullins, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
The 11-minute film is set in a World War I-like battle zone, where two soldiers from opposing sides engage in a secret chess game, communicating their moves via a bomb-dodging carrier pigeon over a no man’s land. snowfall. At the story’s climax, both armies are ordered into bloody hand-to-hand combat as the opening lines of John and Yoko’s song play: “So this is Christmas/And what have you done?”
For Sean Lennon, who in recent years has gradually taken on the responsibility of managing his parents’ artistic legacy (his mother, 91, has officially retired), the film is part of an ongoing process to keep that work relevant to the younger generations. He is well aware that even a Beatles classic can fade without care.
“It’s not about undermining the past,” Lennon said by phone. “You’re competing with generations of people who haven’t grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted. Therefore, for me, it is very important that the message of peace and love, which can be a trope, is not forgotten.”
“What I don’t want,” he added, “is for my mother and father’s work to disappear with the sand of time.”
The film was made with the help of some substantial forces. Mullins was a longtime animator at Pixar and in 2021 he joined Brad Booker, the film’s producer, in a new production company. ElectroLiga; “War Is Over” is his first completed project. The score is by Thomas Newman, the Oscar-nominated composer whose credits include “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Wall-E.” Lennon and Ono are among the executive producers.
Lennon was connected to Mullins through a mutual friend, and in an initial meeting they came up with the basic concept of the war scenario, the chess game, and the carrier pigeon. Mullins said that he wrote the entire script immediately afterwards. (Lennon and Mullins are credited with the film’s story, and Mullins has sole writing credit.)
Lennon had recently met director Peter Jackson through “The Beatles: Get Back,” his three-part, nearly eight-hour odyssey into the band’s troubled recording sessions in early 1969, and Lennon asked him for advice on “War “Is Over.” .” Mullins recalled that at a dinner with Lennon in March 2022, she watched in stunned silence as Lennon texted Jackson, his phone making a small whistle as each message was sent. “My heart was beating a mile a minute,” Mullins recalled. “My God, Peter Jackson has our script!”
Jackson’s visual effects company, Weta FX, handled the animation for “War Is Over,” although Jackson himself was not involved. In an email, he said that he only watched the film once it was finished.
“I’m really proud to have played a small role in bringing it to life,” Jackson said. “He is entertaining and charming, and celebrates humanity without being preachy.”
The film was created with Unreal Engine, a platform originally developed for video games by the company behind Fortnite. The animation process involved performance capture: photographing real actors, whose movements later become the raw material for computer animation.
A lot of work went into creating the look of the animation, which, despite being computer-generated, has a hand-drawn style, with outlines that can resemble charcoal sketches.
Production on “War Is Over” began before war broke out in Ukraine and Hamas attacked Israel just as they were finishing the project. But Lennon said the goal was always to make the story more universal. “We tried to abstract the aesthetics of World War I into a kind of parallel dimension that wasn’t that war specifically,” he said.
In the film, the two armies wear insignia with opposing geometric designs: the symbols on one side are rounded and those on the other are angular. The battle scenes show soldiers of multiple races and ethnicities, representing all of humanity.
“In our first conversation, Sean insisted that he didn’t want the film to take place in a identifiable war,” Jackson recalled. “He wanted the song’s message to be the focus, and not muddy it up with Brits fighting Germans or Americans fighting Vietnamese.”
That message, and how it was conveyed, was key to the work of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Before “War Is Over” was a song, it was part of a series of peace protests the couple carried out in various forms throughout 1969, including “beds.” That December they published black and white billboards in 12 major cities around the world displaying variations of: “The war is over! If you wish, Merry Christmas from John and Yoko.”
It was, perhaps, an early example of a guerrilla media campaign, using the power of celebrities to convey a subversive message. “I think you could argue,” Sean Lennon said, “that my mom and dad invented memes before that term existed.”
“War Is Over” is the latest Beatles-related project he has been involved with. He was a point of contact for Jackson on “Get Back” and on the release of “Now and Then,” the reworked John Lennon demo from the 1970s that was released in November as “the last Beatles song.”
For more than a decade, the Beatles, and each individual member, have been the subject of a series of reissues, repackagings, and re-examinations of various kinds, and it’s not over. Last month it was announced that director Sam Mendes would make four biopics, one for each Beatle, expected in 2027.
Lennon, who remains an active musician, released his latest album, “Asterisms” last month, he said he saw “War Is Over” as the kind of project that would allow him to honor his parents’ legacy, an opportunity his mother gave him.
“I’m just grateful that he gave me the freedom to try to do weird things like this,” Lennon said. “You know, she’s still the queen of the family.”
