Short Film: Pica-Don (Japan, 1978)

"Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

Donald "Size Matters" Trump

What we have here is an award-winning and forgotten animated from Japan which, much like A Short Vision (1956), our Short Film of the Month for September 2015, is beginning to have possible greater relevance than had in decades. "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," goes the often paraphrased statement by the Spanish-born philosopher poet George Santayana. Not a pleasant concept.

Pika-don was made by the husband-and-wife team of Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita, who ran their own Tokyo-based independent animation studio called Studio Lotus. Renzo died in 1997. His wife Sayoko is still alive today. 

Much of the short is about the day in the life of a family in Hiroshima prior to 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. A day like any other day….

To simply quote Wikipedia: "On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the nuclear weapon 'Little Boy' was dropped on Hiroshima from an American Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets, directly killing an estimated 70,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 2,000 Korean slave laborers. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought the total number of deaths to 90,000–166,000. The population before the bombing was around 340,000 to 350,000. About 70% of the city's buildings were destroyed, and another 7% severely damaged."

Airship Daily explains: "Pikadon means 'flash boom'. It refers to what those witnessing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw and heard: first a blinding light, then a deafening explosion."

When it comes to nuclear warheads, the size of one's button in immaterial.