"Wild creatures flee in terror as a strange missile flies overhead. As it passes over the sleeping city, the world's leaders and wise men look upwards. The missile explodes, destroying humans, wild creatures and the Earth itself. A Short Vision became one of the most influential British animated films ever made when it was screened on US television as part of the popular Ed Sullivan Show. Although children were advised to leave the room while it played, it still caused outrage and alarm with its graphic representation of the horrors of nuclear war. But it also caught the mood of the times, since the mid-1950s was the height of both the Cold War and nuclear paranoia, as depicted (sometimes allegorically) in such American films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)."