A film created for the Vancouver World's fair in 1986, Rainbow War is a light-hearted, cartoony little short that as the underlying Aesop of tolerance and love. Largely in Pantomime, the film tells the story of three kingdoms of color: the paranoid Red Kingdom, the arrogant Blue Kingdom, and the domineering Gold Kingdom. While each kingdom hates the other for their differences, life is peaceful because there is no way to travel between them. This peace is shattered when a young inventor from the Gold Kingdom creates a flying contraption and crashes into the Red Leader's daughter. What follows is, of course, a war of colorful paint between the three kingdoms. The film is considered a cult classic in Canada and is commonly shown in Canadian schools.
This film contains examples of:
- Always Save the Girl: The ceasefire begins when everyone spots the Red Leader's daughter dangling off a cliff.
- An Aesop: The underlying message is that all of our differences can combine to make a beautiful rainbow. Aww.
- Art Attacker: Everyone is this, using paint brushes, paint rollers, and buckets of paint as weapons. Some are also using palettes as shields. This of course results in loads of slapstick.
- Art Initiates Life: The inventor does this accidentally. After finishing his sketch of the flying ring, it flies off the page and takes him along for the ride.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Both women end up covered in gobs of paint just like the men.
- Casanova Wannabe: The Blue Leader tries to seduce the Yellow Leader when he first meets her. But since all of his gifts are the wrong color, all he succeeds at doing is aggravating her.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The citizens of each kingdom wear their respective kingdom's color. Justified, as they're not allowed to wear anything else in-universe.
- Colorful Contrails: After saving the Red Leader's daughter, the inventor's flying ring passes through a waterfall of paint and produces a rainbow contrail.
- Cool Shades: The leader of the Yellow Kingdom wears a very large pair.
- Culture Police: Each kingdom has soldiers with art supplies on hand to cover up any deviant colors.
- Defrosting the Ice Queen: Implied with the Yellow Leader after she is coated in paint by two of her former soldiers during the finale.
- Distracted by the Luxury: Attempted but ultimately failed — the Blue King tries to entice the Yellow Queen first with a jeweled necklace, then with flowers, and finally with a frilly negligee (all in various shades of blue). She rebuffs his gifts and orders her troops to attack.
- Dystopian Edict: Citizens may only wear their own kingdom's color and nothing else. Each kingdom has their own way of enforcing this. The Blue Kingdom makes it a fashion faux pas to wear anything other than blue. The Red Kingdom promotes red as trustworthy, and all other colors are deemed as suspicious. The Gold Kingdom aggressively censors other colors so that citizens only know yellow.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Red is Germany, Blue is France, Gold is the Soviet Union.
- Forgotten Framing Device: The movie starts off telling us the story as a pop-up book, complete with turning the pages. However, by the end, the book motif has disappeared.
- Floating Continent: All three kingdoms are floating in the sky, surrounded by clouds.
- Iron Lady: The Gold Kingdom's queen sports the Power Hair and Cool Shades to go with it.
- Medium Awareness: In the beginning of the film, the Blue Leader notices the page being turned on him and starts to panic.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Not only does the inventor give his own kingdom the means to invade the others, he inspires the Blue Kingdom to do the same. Oops.
- No Name Given: Since there is no dialogue, none of the characters' names are mentioned. The IMDB page only lists the main characters by their titles or occupations.
- Once Upon a Time: The movie's opening line.Once upon a time, in a timeless place, there were three kingdoms.
- Parental Fashion Veto: The Red Leader takes away the yellow scarf the inventor gave to his daughter. She takes it back when he isn't looking.
- Those Magnificent Flying Machines: The flyer that the inventor comes up with can be described as a rocket-propelled hula hoop. Meanwhile, the Blue Kingdom uses floating bathtubs suspended from giant bubbles.
- Visual Pun: There's lot's of them, One of them being The Yellow Kingdom using a giant yellow dog balloon to stop the Red Kingdom's giant fire hydrant weapon. there's also an audio pun with The Yellow leader who has the cry of a red-tailed hawk (that everyone will likely mistake for the cry of a bald eagle)
