Norman Norton's Use Of Conflict In The Movie Neighbours

Norman McLaren’s Film, “Neighbours” (1952), conveys that war is pointless and we fail to realize that it is an unintentional fight against our own selves. He proves his point by showing in his film how the two main characters’ violent conflict ends up destroying the flower that they were fighting for in the first place, and later on it escalates even further to the point of having both of them and their families dead. Norman’s purpose is to show how greed will always pave way to conflict and conflict can pave way to much worse sufferings in order to make the audience realise that if we want to live in harmony we mustn’t show selfishness and the things that we wouldn’t want to happen to us, we mustn’t do them to other people.
At first glance it is fairly easy to realise that this film
is an anti war film.
We are given signs from the very beginning of the film when both neighbours are reading newspaper, and on one it says “War certain if no peace” , while on the other one it says “Peace certain if no war”. Although nothing significant happened so far, this embeds the idea of war in our heads, and as we see later on that they start fighting we immediately relate it to war. The fighting ensues when one is seen smelling the flower by himself and the other one gets jealous. Since the characters mirror each other that can signify that they’re both equal in terms of riches, but when the opportunity arises for them to be more prosperous than the other they engage in war so they can claim ownership over the flower. One would also feel jealous if the other one was different. The fences that they build stand as a border; this is can represent one country separating into two sides when at war. As the fighting gets more violent, they end up becoming fuelled by hatred, they forget about the flower, and they kill each other’s families, then they die from all the fighting. This tries to point out how two forces can start a war against each
other due to a reason, and they can go at it until they start to hate each other, and even innocent people will die, at that point it becomes too personal and the reason for the war is forgotten and fighting continues just because of the hatred. As we can see, this clearly points out that war doesn’t solve anything, instead it just makes things worse, which was not the point of the war in the first place, instead it’s the total opposite. After we realise that we just think about how stupid and nonsensical war is. And that is what this film tries to point out, it makes us look at the bigger picture, it makes us ask ourselves, was it worth it to have their families killed just for a flower, which they didn’t even get in the end? Was it worth it for them to die? Of course the answer is no. The answer to that question will always be no, and that’s why this film does a good job at delivering its message.
The characters at first get along well and are a complete replica of each other. There is no dialogue so all their emotions and feelings are expressed through facial expressions, body language an their actions. If we take into consideration Eric Berne’s transactional analysis theory, at the beginning when the two characters are sitting outside together they are sharing an adult-to-adult transaction, but as soon as they start fighting over the flower both of them are being the parent, and refuse to be the child which therefore results in their conflict. As a result of their continuous conflict and hatred that builds up, they start to be controlled by their instinctual desires of destruction, their ID, which leads them to kill each other and their families.
The film uses a lot of slapstick comedy, and it is very prominent during the fight scene. Most of the slapstick humour is done during the pixilation scenes because the technique allows for exaggerated movement and therefore makes the characters movements look absurd and comical. The humour works well with the film because it does a good job at making the characters’ actions look ridiculous, it tells the audience that the actions they have decided to take in order to solve their problem is foolish and laughable.