A Short Vision is a short film, running at around 6 minutes in length, released by the British Film Institute in 1956 and later uploaded to YouTube on the BFI National Archive's account. It was made by Peter and Joan Foldes, and was their last co-made project together.
The short film tells of an ambiguous city at night, where human beings sleep, animals hunt and "wise men" (politicians, scientists) observe the skies. A peculiar object appears in the sky, terrifying any creature that sees it. What the film reveals is that this is no ordinary object, and that once it's released, there's no taking it back.
A Short Vision featured a stop-motion-like animation style with drawn panels that would show brief transitions. It was shown at least twice on The Ed Sullivan Show, and appeared in public school classrooms as a reel.
This short film provides examples of the following tropes:
- Artistic License – Biology: A Short Vision is no exception in nuclear war movies to the classic shot of a character's eyeballs melting from the radiation, but whether or not this can actually happen is disputed [1]
. Artistic license perhaps rightly applies, considering that Joan and Peter Foldes thankfully had no real-life examples for comparison and used their imaginations. - Big Bad: Mankind.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The film's shift in tone goes from animated leopards and mice and sleeping babies, to men and women having their faces melting off as they've vaporized by nuclear weapons.
- Downer Ending: The last living creature to survive is a small moth, which is killed after trying to fly too close to the remaining blaze of a nuclear war.
- Eye Scream: A man is seen screaming and shutting his eyes. Animation transitions give viewers a grisly sight of the man's eyelids melting away, revealing bulging eyes in their sockets, which then bubble and melt away, revealing empty sockets.
- Facial Horror: The film depicts the graphic mutilation of several human and animal faces, caused by radiation.
- Gorn: The film's second half is surprisingly graphic for its 1950s release date, and doesn't hide anything. No Gory Discretion Shot to be found here. Nothing is left up to the imagination.
- Green Aesop: This isn't an immediately apparent trope until the film's climax, but it's made pretty clear by the end that nuclear pollution is bad for all life on Earth.
- Lemony Narrator: The film's unnamed British narrator recites the story in third-person and describes it almost like a Biblical fable.
- Misplaced Wildlife: This film, set in an ambiguous British city, also features a leopard and a gazelle. The owl and the mouse are a bit more plausible.
- Nuclear Option: The strange object in the sky, which the filmmakers are highly critical of.
- Time Stands Still: The film depicts every conscious being petrified by the sight of the object in the sky, unmoving and still. With good reason, as the object is revealed to be a nuclear bomb.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: A Short Vision is presumably set in some British western city, but there is nothing to even hint at what city this is. No name or hint of location is dropped, and to make possibilities even murkier, this western city features a gazelle and a leopard.
