Continuing my series of, if not hot then certainly lukewarm takes on stuff:
This is Toys, a National Film Board of Canada short film from the late 1960s (it has been uploaded by the NFB so posting the link is legit). Directed by Grant Munro, it was made during the Vietnam War and the central sequence of it following the lengthy introduction is a mixture of still and stop motion imagery showing a bunch of toys (the original GI Joe action figures back when they were actually big and I have no idea how the NFB got away with using them without Hasbro getting grumpy) in a simulated battle.
It's cool as hell. Which is the problem and why this award-winning film is considered on many levels to be a failure.
It was intended to condemn the selling of war toys, and could in fact be credited to a degree with the movement to scale back production of such toys, which resulted in GI Joe changing to "The Adventure Team in the 1970s and becoming a more benign rescue force rather than warriors.
Why was Toys a failure? Read the comments under the Youtube video. A lot of kids (myself included) who saw this when we were children (it was shown regularly in elementary schools and as filler on Saturday morning TV) found the action, the sound and everything else to be thrilling. For me, it was the gateway to Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation shows that used a similar style of animation (albeit Munro's characters didn't talk). And it certainly didn't stop parents from buying the toys for kids. It more likely just sold a bunch of GI Joes.
One of the comments on this in response to someone who was anti-war toys is interesting: they say that due to GI Joe and the Six Million Dollar Man line, they went into medicine. So that's a win.
And it didn't even result in permanent change to GI Joe. Sure, they were no longer exclusively war-based, but it could be argued that some of the current iterations of GI Joe are far more violent than anything depicted in Toys. Compare with any of the GI Joe films, or an issue of the comic from a few years back were a young woman decides to either join or stay with GI Joe because she realizes she's really good at killing people (not because she wanted to become a nurse or scuba diver which might have been the case in the 1970s post-Grant Munro Adventure Team era of the GI Joe franchise and yes there were a few female characters in the line though these days it's the bearded guy with the kung-fu grip that's remembered).
None of this takes away the fact that Toys is an amazing film and there's no denying its heart is in the right place (plus to be fair Munro could only get away with so much in a film made in 1967 for a child audience, and even then there is one moment that still haunts people 57 years later - you'll know it when you see it). But if you want something that more effectively drives home the anti-conflict Aesop, I'd recommend Norman McLaren's genuinely creepy and Oscar-winning Neighbours. This thing has been giving people nightmares for 72 years:
PS: Both videos have been uploaded officially to Youtube by the National Film Board of Canada. The links may not work outside Canada. If you are geoblocked, there are unofficial uploads available elsewhere on Youtube of both films and both may also be available on archive.org, though if you can see the NFB ones they're taken from original (likely remastered) source material and look amazing.
