Peace on Earth (1939)
Good animated shorts are hard to come by. I have a few favorites I keep going back to, especially in the mornings before work. There's one in particular however that I have a special fondness for, but it's the kind of fondness that leaves you with a weird ache inside. The following short features your typical menagerie of talking creatures, but it did something unique by placing them in a future where humans have eradicated all human life on Earth. A World War 3 scenario of sorts. The woodland creatures rebuild from the ashes of man, and make the most of the remains of a terrifying past. There is something humbling about this one that rises above and beyond mere sentimentality. Which begs the question: since when did we become afraid of sentimentality? I know why we became afraid. That's not a very hard answer to situate at all: it's paradoxically linked to the rise of the cult of the intellectual and the unsentimental as a mode of life. As an unproductive mode of li