Sean Ono Lennon debuts music video for ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’

So this is Christmas, and what have you done?

In Sean Ono Lennon’s case, he’s taken one of his parents’ defining pieces of musical activism, recontextualised and reinvigorated it in a powerful mini-movie with the help of Peter Jackson and a Pixar legend, then won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the 2024 Academy Awards, and now made the prize-winning animation freely available to watch on YouTube, with a built-in mechanism for viewers to donate to Warchild.

The apple, clearly, brilliantly, doesn’t fall far from the tree.

‘The idea was to do a music video for the song,’ begins Ono Lennon of a five-years-in-the-making project that resulted in War Is Over!, a beautiful, 11-minute feature – as its subtitle has it, ‘Inspired By The Music of John & Yoko’ – that launched online this week. The song is 1971’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s deathless, seasonally ubiquitous and thereby very familiar anti-war anthem. That inciting idea was to mark the song’s half-century, in 2021. But heading into that 50th anniversary four years ago, their son wasn’t feeling that particular idea. Or, as he puts it, 'I personally might not be interested in watching a regular music video for a song that I knew that well. We all hear that song every Christmas. It's sort of a standard at this point.

'So I thought it would be more interesting to do a short film that supported the message of the song. But then have the actual song drop in [at the end], like the score of a film would do. That was the basic idea: to make it more interesting to watch.'

Film: WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko - The Academy Award® winning Animated Short - YouTube

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The 50-year-old New Yorker – a musician and filmmaker in his own right, and careful curator of his parents’ artistic and personal legacies – partnered with Dave Mullins. The latter is an animator/director/writer whose storied CV includes Pixar favourites Ratatouille, Up, Cars 2, Incredibles 2 and Soul. Together, they imagineered a story set in a First World War-type battlefield, the action rendered in a combination of animation and the performance-capture perfected by computer-game creators. A pigeon carries messages between the trenches, with the story’s universalism and contemporaneousness underscored by the combatants and their uniforms/insignia carefully designed not to evoke particular nations. But rather than carrying battle orders, as these service animals did on the Western Front, this pigeon is carrying instructions for chess moves to and from two soldiers stuck on opposing sides. They're locked in a game of brotherly competition despite their armies being stuck in mortal combat.

'That was mainly because my parents love chess, and my mum is a big chess fan,' Ono Lennon says. 'And I love chess, too. So it seemed like a nice metaphor. And I liked the idea of a messenger pigeon, because, well, I just love birds. I always thought it was touching that so many pigeons sacrificed their lives to help humans through World Wars One and Two.'

Heavyweight help making War Is Over! also came from New Zealand’s Wētā FX, the digital visual effects and computer animation company. It was co-founded by Jackson, the filmmaker who pivoted from one epic fable series (his Tolkien adaptations) to another (his revelatory Beatles documentary trilogy Get Back). Without spoiling this perfectly executed miniature’s ending – which also features a score by 15-time Oscar-nominee Thomas Newman – the result is a film that delivers the never-more-urgent message of 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)' but sweetened in a compellingly persuasive new way.

In that regard, Ono Lennon is following in his father’s spirit. As John Lennon said after the success of his peacenik anthem ‘Imagine’, written earlier the same year as 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)': “Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey." In the artfully crafted, elegantly told, intensely emotional War Is Over!, Ono Lennon and his collaborators have done exactly the same: kids who've grown up with The Incredibles and Cars will come to watch this movie initially as a wonderful piece of animation in and of itself – and they'll come to the anti-war message secondarily.

'Well, thank you for that comparison,' says Ono Lennon. 'That is the best-case scenario for me. If this short film can be one more vehicle through which we can introduce people – young people especially – to the ideas and the message of John and Yoko's music and political activism, then we really succeeded. That would be, for me, an even bigger success than winning the Oscar.'

Watch War Is Over! here. Warchild donations link here.