The reality of Britain post-Russian nuclear strike soon proves that to be untrue and leaves James and Hilda wishing they’d not survived at all.Īs a full blown antiwar broadside, When The Wind Blows is hugely effective and deeply affecting. Having survived the horrors of a world war some decades previously, the couple believe they’ll make it through all right this time round.

Voiced with suitable gravitas by Mills and Ashcroft, two pillars of the British acting world, they are sweetly sketched and believable figures from a Britain where nuclear annihilation was always lurking uneasily at the back of the general public’s minds.īeing good citizens they read their government pamphlets that tell them, with typical coldness, to prepare for the worst and they build a miserable little lean-to shelter that they pile high with Hilda’s scatter cushions positioned just so to soak up the post-apocalypse radiation. In the affable and depressingly ordinary couple of James and Hilda we have everyday figures whose gruesome fate is rendered all the more grim because of their mundane surroundings. Originally released in 1986, it tells the tale of a likable old couple, James and Hilda (voiced by Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft), who live out a simple life in the English countryside that is suddenly thrown into turmoil when the threat of imminent nuclear destruction rears its ugly head.Īs neat little moral tales go, it couldn’t be further from The Snowman, Briggs’s much more fondly thought of animated epic, if it tried. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.BASED on the Raymond Briggs story of the same name, When The Wind Blows is the kind of low key British animation that stays with you long after the credits roll.

This chapter will firstly situate the graphic novel within its historical context, before analyzing the text to show how Briggs uses this medium to question the role of weapons, war, and the government, drawing the reader into the personal story of one couple and their attempts to implement the advice found in official government literature that they believe will help them survive a nuclear war, and using this to offer a critique of the attitudes of the population, the government, and of nuclear war itself, through the narrative, the visual imagery, and the peritextual information that surrounds the novel. In doing so, Briggs uses the story to offer a damning critique of the trust placed in the government and the use of nuclear weapons, through representing the effects of such a disaster on an ordinary married couple. In 1982, Raymond Briggs released his first graphic novel, When the Wind Blows, which tells the story of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, as they prepare for and attempt to survive a nuclear war, based on real governmental information: the Protect and Survive pamphlet, designed to be issued to householders across the UK in the event of a war.

When the wind blows by raymond briggs