War Is Over! (full title: War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko) is a 2022 animated short film (11 minutes) directed by Dave Mullins. It was co-written by Mullins and John Lennon's son Sean.
Two armies are fighting World War I-style trench warfare, somewhere in a nameless valley. The war is brutal and savage, as all war is—but two soldiers from the two enemy armies are playing correspondence chess! They are sending chess moves back and forth via messages tied to the leg of a messenger pigeon. But war is not conducive to chess...
Tropes:
- Binocular Shot: The standard binocular shot is how one of the chess players, looking out over the trenches, sees that the enemy is attacking.
- Chekhov's Gun: The way the two men are playing chess, writing notes on tiny scraps of paper. The two chess players, who obviously don't know each other, are fighting in no-man's-land and it seems one is about to kill the other, when he grasps at the other man's uniform—and a bunch of little scraps of paper with chess moves fly out of the other man's pocket. The first man then shows the second another scrap with a move, and they realize they are chess opponents.
- Flipping the Table: In this instance it comes not from either of the players, but from an officer, who is outraged to find his man playing correspondence chess with the enemy.
- Instant Messenger Pigeon: Soldiers play chess on opposing sides of the front lines by sending moves back and forth via a pigeon, which also carries messages from one army's headquarters to the front. This cartoon makes the classic error of having the messenger pigeon go back and forth, indeed to three different destinations, when real messenger pigeons are exclusively a one-way communication device.
- Silence Is Golden: There is no spoken dialogue in the short.
- Time-Passes Montage: A montage shows the two soldiers in their two tents, on opposite sides of the lines, as the chess game advances. It begins to draw the attention of other soldiers on each side.
- Title Drop: The last message that the pigeon dies delivering, says "WAR IS OVER!" The soldiers stop fighting.
- Titled After the Song: More or less. The short takes its title from John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", which plays at the end.
