Grasshoppers is an animated short by Bruno Bozzetto

Bruno Bozzetto

Bruno Bozzetto is an Italian cartoon animator, creator of many short pieces, mainly of a political or satirical nature. He created his first animated short "Tapum! the weapons' story" in 1958 at the age of 20. His most famous character, a hapless little man named "Signor Rossi" Bruno Bozzetto...

 which condenses the whole of human civilization into 9 minutes, focusing primarily on the human race's predilection for warfare and the vanity of war. It was an Oscar Nominee for Best Animated Short in 1991.

Each piece of history is presented as a simple vignette, usually depicting a few simply-drawn characters arguing and making war, over and over again. Generally, a single figure is meant to stand in for an entire group (i.e., a single Caesar-like caricature for the entire line of Roman Emperors).

There is very little spoken dialogue; instead, most of the cartoon is accompanied by a bouncy piano-driven score, which frequently changes style to suit the particular historical era. However, the score is all based around a single simple theme, to which it frequently returns in between vignettes.

Plot

In the course of 9 minutes, Grasshoppers takes us through the following parts of history:

• The discovery of fire, and the development of tools and weapons, which Modern Man uses to remove the threat of the larger but less intelligent Neanderthal
  Neanderthal
  The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
  
  ;
• Ancient Egypt
  Ancient Egypt
  Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
  
  : an animal worshipper clashes with a sun-worshipper;
• A tragedy in Ancient Greece
  Ancient Greece
  Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
  
  , where a dancer and a musician fall in love and are killed by a king, who is then attacked and defeated by the Roman Empire;
• The Roman Empire, represented by a single "Caesar
  Caesar (title)
  Caesar is a title of imperial character. It derives from the cognomen of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator...
  
  -like" figure, who repeatedly sends troops off to plunder the cultures at the fringes of the empire, until they eventually come back to defeat the now lazy, unprepared later Empire. The birth of Jesus Christ is also alluded to, but it only distracts the warring parties for a split second;
• The continual fight for supremacy between the monarchies of medieval Western Europe;
• The rise of Islam
  Islam
  Islam . The most common are and .   : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
  
  , leading eventually to the Crusades
  Crusades
  The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...
  
  ;
• Genghis Khan
  Genghis Khan
  Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....
  
  's siege of China, and the construction of the Great Wall;
• The Spanish conquest of the Americas;
• The French Revolution
  French Revolution
  The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
  
  ;
• The British/French Wars (possibly the wars of the First and Second Coalition);
• The American Revolution;
• The Napoleonic Wars
  Napoleonic Wars
  The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
  
  ;
• The United States' systematic removal of Native Americans;
• World War II
  World War II
  World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
  
   and Nazi Germany
  Nazi Germany
  Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
  
  , which leads to the Nuclear Age (a bright white flash from off-screen vaporizes goose-stepping Nazis, though not a literal occurrence, like many events in the cartoon, a metaphor for the fact that the atomic bomb effectively ended WWII, and ushered in a frightening new era);
• Recent years, up to the present day (1990, the year of the cartoon), which encompasses the Cold War
  Cold War
  The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
  
  , the Vietnam
  Vietnam War
  The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
  
   and/or Korean War
  Korean War
  The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
  
  s, and the continual skirmishing that occurs still today, between all manner of nations, organizations, and individuals.

As the centuries (and later decades) pass, the pace of the animation grows gradually faster and more frantic.

At the beginning and end of the cartoon, and occasionally in between vignettes, the cartoon abandons the struggles of humanity to focus briefly on a shot of grass growing and insects buzzing over the ruins of previous battles. In the final shot, the camera finally zooms in tighter on the grass to allow us to glimpse two grasshoppers

Grasshopper

The grasshopper is an insect of the suborder Caelifera in the order Orthoptera. To distinguish it from bush crickets or katydids, it is sometimes referred to as the short-horned grasshopper...

happily mating.