Igra ("The Game") is a 1963 animated short film of about 13 minutes, by Dusan Vukotic, produced by Zagreb Film.
A boy and a girl, maybe of kindergarten age, are sitting on a floor drawing on colored paper. The boy breaks his pencil lead, and the girl refuses to hand her pencil over, instead giving him a sharpener. After the girl draws a flower on her piece of paper, the boy, annoyed, draws a picture of a car—which comes to life, starts up, drives over to the girl's picture, and squashes her flower. The girl draws holes in the tires of the car, which promptly deflate. After the girl draws an avatar of herself on her paper, which also comes to live, the boy draws a mouse, which he sends over to scare the girl's avatar...and an Escalating War starts in which the hand-drawn cartoon warfare between the little boy and the little girl grows steadily more brutal.
A mixture of live action, for the children, and animation for their drawings. It can be watched here
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Tropes:
- Allegory: An allegory for the horrors of war. It ends when they knock over an ink bottle, spilling ink over their drawings, symbolizing nuclear holocaust.
- Downer Ending: The boy's nuclear bomb detonates over the girl's house, which is echoed in live action with the boy accidentally knocking over an ink bottle, destroying all their drawings. The children are left crying as the cartoon ends.
- Eek, a Mouse!!: Before things start getting really violent, one of the first thing the boy does to annoy the girl is make a drawing of a mouse, which runs over and scares the girl's avatar.
- Escalating War: Running over a flower, deflating tires, drawing a mouse to scare a girl, drawing a cat to scare the mouse, drawing a dog to scare the cat...drawing a lion...drawing tanks and planes and missiles. Finally the short ends with the girl and boy actually hitting each other as his missile bears down on her drawing of a house.
- Mars and Venus Gender Contrast: The girl draws things like flowers, while they boy draws cars, tanks, planes, etc. For that matter the boy takes most of the aggressive actions, while the girl's actions are mostly defensive, at least until she draws herself a gun.
- Medium Blending: Live-action footage of the children, animation for the figures they draw.
- My God, What Have I Done?: A non-verbal variation. After their fighting results in the destruction of all their drawings, the boy and girl can do nothing but cry.
- Stop Motion: A little bit of "pixilation" stop motion is employed for the otherwise live-action footage of the girl and the boy drawing.
- Tank Goodness: At one point the boy draws a tank to destroy the girl's house. The girl defeats the tank by ripping the paper in half and pulling the pages apart, creating an anti-tank ditch that the tank plunges into.
