When the Wind Blows
(Channel 4 Region 2 PAL DVD)
(1986)
review by Blackgloves

The feature-length animated film, "When the Wind Blows", takes us back to the heady early days of Channel 4, when the recently formed British TV station was then more infamous for its radical social and political Marxist agenda (and minuscule ratings) than for its current reliance on a desperate mix of reality TV and imported American sitcoms. Producer, John Coates, had just finished work on TVC's acclaimed animated adaptation of children's author Raymond Briggs' illustrated novel, "The Snowman", when he was given Briggs' follow-up, "When the Wind Blows", to read while in bed recovering from flue. Expecting to have his mood lifted by another of the author's famed magical tales along the lines of "Father Christmas" or "Fungus the Bogeyman", Coates, instead, found himself assailed by an angry piece of pro-nuclear disarmament polemic, in which the lead characters of one of the author's earlier storybooks -- Jim & Hilda Bloggs of "Gentleman Jim" -- have their tranquil and innocent children's book existence in the Sussex countryside (where Briggs himself still lives) swept away forever by a thermonuclear blast centred on London; they then proceed to die slowly and painfully from the effects of radiation sickness while waiting, ever patiently but quite vainly, for the Government authorities that they continue to trust in, to come and save them!

In "Gentleman Jim", the title character is a working class toilet cleaner whose big dreams are dashed by bureaucracy and middle-class officialdom, despite his persistent cap-doffing deference to authority. Now, in "When the Wind Blows" Jim Bloggs is retired and living in peaceful seclusion in the Sussex countryside with his wife, Hilda. The couple's cosy little cottage and well-tended garden is perched amid comforting green pastures under warm blue skies full of gorgeous white fluffy clouds. Jim and Hilda are chubby, rosy cheeked pensioners whose baby-like appearance is reinforced by their simple childlike values and misguided trust in the "powers that be".

One day, Jim reads about an impending nuclear war and, on his way home from the public library in town, picks up all the Government and County Council leaflets on what to do in the event of a nuclear strike. Soon, Jim is hard at work, preparing for the mooted catastrophe by following the Government's instructions to the letter -- much to the bemusement of Hilda who carries on as normal. Jim is slightly perplexed by some of the advice in his leaflets: one instruction tells him to remove all the doors in the house in order to build a blast shelter out of them; another tells him to make sure all the doors of the house are closed when the blast hits! One piece of advice would have him remove all the curtains from the windows to stop them catching fire during the blast; but a different instruction tells him he must hang white sheets in the windows to help absorb the heat from the blast! He is advised to build his blast shelter at an angle of sixty-degrees -- but this ensures that Jim & Hilda can barely squeeze into it, let alone remain holed-up there for the full period of fourteen days like the leaflets tell them to! Nevertheless, despite his confusion, Jim soldiers on as best he can. Then, one day, the three minute warning is given -- Jim and Hilda cram themselves into their makeshift shelter and wait expectantly for the whole ordeal to "blow over" so that they can resume normal life again...

The animation for this story starts out in the same vein as TVC's previous Briggs adaptation, and like the original book on which the film is based, it goes out of its way to look like the bright, comforting fairy-tail set-up that the author's past career had led one to expect from him. This is brilliantly captured in the double meaning of the film's title of course, which refers both to the children's lullaby and the wind of a nuclear winter. The character designs for Jim and Hilda are pleasantly ordinary with just a hint of the characters' infantile nature detectable in their rosy complexions; getting Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft to voice them was a masterstroke: Mills excelled in playing put-upon victims and his gentle, slightly lost-sounding voicing of the character Jim, captures just the "bewildered Everyman" quality required. Ashcroft's voice, meanwhile embodies the happy, ignorance-is-bliss attitude of Hilda to a tee.

As the build up to disaster mounts, the animation incorporates live-action news footage to hint at "reality" gradually encroaching on the couples' picture-book idyll. When the blast finally does hit, the animation cleverly introduces three-dimensional live-action backgrounds as a backdrop against the animated characters, to finally indicate that there is no more hiding from the grim carnage of a post-nuclear reality ... although this doesn't stop JIm & Hilda taking refuge in self-delusion, as we'll see.

Although the whole thing is executed brilliantly by the animation team and voice actors, the film ultimately fails to convince. The reason for this is buried in the very roots of the piece's concept: the characters, Jim and Hilda (no one else is featured in the entire eighty-five minutes) are simply not in the least bit sympathetic! By an hour into the film, not only did I not care that these characters were inevitably going to die... I actually wanted that death to be as slow and painful as it eventually was!

Now, perhaps I'm just bitter and twisted, but I don't think this is the reason for my reaction to the film. The truth is, Briggs treats his characters with total disdain throughout the entire story; they are portrayed as incorrigibly stupid, ignorant and deluded at every turn. Stupidity is never a sympathetic quality and when it reaches the pathological levels depicted in this work, it is positively irritating. The trouble is, it is hard to decide whether this a miscalculation on the part of the author or whether this effect is what he was after all along. I suspect that Briggs has got side-tracked by other issues that have hijacked the work somewhere along the way!

The fact is, Jim and Hilda seem intended to be representatives of the ordinary working class man & woman in the street (hence the surname Bloggs) -- which only makes this film seem doubly insulting with its patronising and sneeringly condescending tone. Like any piece of political propaganda, there is no attempt to engage with the complexities of the issues; but then, "When the Wind Blows" ends up being less about the issue of Nuclear war than it is about Briggs, the scholarship boy made good, and his bitterness and resentment at his parent's cap-doffing generation -- a generation of aspiring working class who simply refused to stop voting Margaret Thatcher back into power all the way through the eighties, despite the relentless propagandising of the liberal establishment who controlled Channel 4 and much of the media at that time!

The portrayal of Jim and Hilda was evidently an issue for the creators from the start: this remastered DVD edition of the film comes with both a half-hour "making of" documentary, which was made at the time of the film's original release in 1986, and a fifteen minute interview with Briggs, recorded recently especially for the DVD. In both, everyone involved with the production repeatedly protest that the characters are not meant to be seen as stupid, but simply "innocent". But this claim is revealed to be entirely disingenuous by the time one has viewed both extras!

In the "making of", Briggs -- the middle-class Grammer School-educated boy -- himself describes the characters as being "simple and uneducated" almost in the same breath as attempting to rebut the stupidity criticism! The animator who is interviewed in the same documentary, absent-mindedly remarks that he'd like to "wring [Jim's] neck" by the end of the film (no need mate ... he's dead!) and this, indeed, is exactly the emotion that is engendered in the viewer -- more-so than anger at the Government's Nuclear armament policy!

In the interview recorded more recently, where Briggs looks back at the film, he finally admits that the characters are indeed (to use his own word) dim. He claims that they had to be in order for them to follow the Government's Protect and Survive instructions, which they had to do for the sake of the point that the story was trying to make. This doesn't seem a particularly convincing response: if your aim is to portray the horror of surviving a nuclear blast, then surely it makes sense to have your characters possess at least some sympathetic qualities. The characters live in the isolated countryside and so can't easily escape to the blast's epicentre in order to be incinerated immediately (the only response that Briggs considers to be sane in the event of such a catastrophe), consequently, there was no need to have them quite so blasé about the impending nuclear strike; instead, they might simply have been unable to leave. (Jim has only a rickety bicycle to ride into town in, after all!)
If this were the case, they might very reasonably try to follow the instructions in the Government leaflets as a last resort -- only to discover that much that was written in them was contradictory and useless. There is no need to have the characters be quite so trusting and naive as they are in the film. The film therefore falters in its purported primary aim.

Briggs claims that, as well as being a "typical working class couple", Jim and Hilda are also based on his own parents. The author would go on to illustrate a full-scale biography of his parents a decade later in "Ethel and Ernest", and has a large illustration of them painted on one of his cupboards in the background of the recently filmed interview on the disc. Although Briggs does seem quite genuine when he talks of how close he was to his parents (often on the verge of tears when he mentions them in the interview) one can't help feeling that there must have been a few unresolved issues between them and himself before their death. "When the Wind Blows" feels like a bitter indictment of all the qualities he sees as negative both in his parents and people of their generation: Jim and Hilda spend an awful lot of time reminiscing about the wonderful days they had during the Second World War and imagine that any new war will be exactly the same! Hilda in particular, is portrayed as being irredeemably (to put it bluntly) pig ignorant! At least Jim does seem to have some inkling of what's going on around him (although the film is quite contradictory in its handling of him), Hilda, on the other hand, is only concerned about whether her cushions are clean and that Jim doesn't get paint on the curtains while he's trying to paint the windows white to deflect radiation! When Jim informs her that there is about to be a nuclear strike she exclaims "Oh no! Not another strike!" before launching into a rant about commies and left wing unions and how they all ought to be locked up! Considering the obvious political leanings of Briggs, it's clear we are not meant to have much sympathy for Hilda, especially when she dismisses the threat of radiation with daft remarks like, "well, if you can't see it and can't feel it, then it can't really be doing any harm!" By the time Jim -- whose most extreme swear word usually consists of a hearty exclamation of "Crumbs!" -- gets so exasperated by her when she rushes out to bring the washing in, even as the blast is about to strike, that he yells at her "YOU STUPID BITCH! GET IN THE SHELTER", the viewer will be cheering their approval!

But the portrayal of Jim is little better. Although he is depicted as someone who listens and reads the news avidly, he is still utterly ignorant about easily found facts concerning nuclear war. He is shown to be someone who reads a lot but doesn't really understand any of the information he comes across; thus, he constantly mispronounces words and launches into long monologues that quickly disintegrate into gibberish. In view of the fact that the Chernobyl disaster had made the general population cognisant of many of the facts concerning fallout and radiation around this time, does Briggs really think that they would all be as stupid and downright thick as Jim is shown to be here? Or is it simply that he could not imagine that anyone might be able to have a different political opinion from his own without being completely brain dead?

After the blast, when Jim and Hilda finally emerge from their battered shelter made of their house doors, they are perplexed by the devastation wrought around them: their sunny idyll is now a grey and doom-laden landscape of charred trees and blackened ruins, yet the couple are apparently surprised that they cannot get the television to work, even after already establishing that the electricity is off (and being surprised about that too)! All attempts to make "a nice cup of tea" similarly come to nought! Thirsty and half-starved, during a storm they collect rainwater to drink (since the milkman has unaccountably missed them for some reason!), despite Jim having always previously banged on about the dangers of fallout -- and we realise, at this point, that he never did have any idea what the term meant! Hilda's gums eventually start to bleed and her hair falls out; both she and Jim begin to develop ugly sores all over their bodies, yet Jim continues to refuse to face the situation, proclaiming that these kinds of ailments are all perfectly normal for people of their age!

All this could be seen as an attempt at the kind of absurdist black comedy that Richard Curtis and Ben Elton managed to perfect so well in "Blackadder Goes Forth"; many of the characters in that series are idiots in a broadly comic sense, but one never gets the sense that -- for instance -- Baldrick, is intended to be an accurate portrayal of the average British soldier in the trenches! The comedy works because of the juxtaposition of absurd, comic book characters with a desperately real situation and the ironic comment on the First World War gains added poignancy from the fact that we actually grow to like these characters since their silliness is never based in reality to begin with. This is not the case with "When the Wind Blows"; Roger Waters' pompous, overblown soft-rock soundtrack and the dreadful indulgence of David Bowie's syrupy title song (neither artist was exactly operating at their peak during the mid-eighties) make it perfectly clear that everything about the film is meant absolutely dead seriously -- withering sarcasm is the closest we ever get to humour in this film, all of it directed at the hapless protagonists.

If anyone involved in this production had stopped to ask at some point, whether these characters really, truly, honestly represented the "average Joe Bloggs" in the street, then the film might have stood some chance of becoming the powerful, disturbing and moving indictment of the bomb that the makers, presumably, intended -- rather than the simple-minded and downright spiteful leftist polemic it actually ended up as.