I Met The Walrus
Michelle da Silva
Watching the Oscars this year, you may not have known that Juno wasn’t the only Canadian film receiving honors that night. Toronto film I Met The Walrus was nominated for Best Animated Short. And while it lost to Peter And The Wolf, the six-minute film based on a 14-year-old boy’s encounter with John Lennon in 1969 is generating a lot of buzz.
The film is recounts producer Jerry Levitan, a Beatle fanatic, sneaking into Lennon and Yoko Ono’s room at a Toronto hotel during their “bed-in” in an effort to promote peace. Levitan managed to convince Lennon to do an interview about peace and recorded it on an audiotape. Director Josh Raskin has taken this audio and shortened it to be the soundtrack to an animated piece. The pen drawings by James Braithwaite beautifully illustrate the romance and serenity of Lennon’s language in the Beatles’ era animation for movies like Yellow Submarine.
A hit at Sundance and the AFI Fest in the Middle East, I Met The Walrus is a charming and relevant reminder of Lennon’s message of peace.
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