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
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