‘A fascinating insight into pandemic psychology’: how Animal Crossing gave us an escape
‘Today is the first day of your new life on this pristine, lovely island. So, congratulations!” says Tom Nook, the benevolent tanuki landlord, a few minutes into Animal Crossing: New Horizons. (Nook is often besmirched online, but you can’t argue that he’s extremely welcoming.) Many players read this comforting message at a destabilising and frightening time in the real world: Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out on Nintendo Switch on 20 March 2020, a few days before the UK entered its first Covid lockdown.
This was fortuitous timing. When we were all stuck at home, the game let us plant our native fruits, tend to our flowers and see what the town shop had on offer, repaying our extensive loans (interest-free, thankfully) to Tom Nook as a way of escaping the chaos and daily death tolls. We opened the gates to our islands and welcomed friends and strangers into our pristine little worlds. As real life crumbled, we started anew with bespectacled cats, sheep in clown’s coats and rhinos who looked like cakes.
The game’s sudden popularity caused Nintendo Switch sales to skyrocket among pandemic-induced shortages. New Horizons had sold 44.79 million units by December 2023 – nearly three-and-a-half times more than any other game in the Animal Crossing series, which has been running since 2001. It’s the second best-selling Switch game to date, behind Mario Kart 8
Deluxe.
Player April tells me she and her partner, Matthew, amassed over 700 hours in the game, turning their island into a joint creative project. “We planned the specific themes and items we were going to use, how the neighbourhoods would look, and even the lore behind some of the places and characters,” she says, adding that an ingame party organised by Matthew was one of the best birthdays she’s ever had.
“I’ve never identified as a gamer and it’s the first game since being a pre-teen that I’ve bought and played,” Amy says. “I could see the sense of community it was offering my friends when we couldn’t do things in real life. We had date nights on there, star-gazing, visiting friends and taking photos with people I was very far removed from in reality.”
Many players, including Amy, still play now. She shares the game with her five-year-old niece: “we now play together and I can pass on what I already know and see the fun continue.” She gets to explore Amy’s island, filled with happy memories created over the past four years.
John O’Shea, creative director of the National Videogame Museum, in Sheffield, is massively proud of his team’s work on the Animal Crossing Diaries, a digital exhibition aiming to document the impactful and memorable moments experienced by players during worldwide lockdowns. O’Shea likens the project to the Science Museum Group collecting key “artefacts” of the Covid era, including the first vial of the vaccine used in a mass immunisation programme.
“In the future, we’ll be able to look at those and say that’s representative of what the pandemic was like. But actually, I think that the Animal Crossing Diaries, as an archive of people’s experiences, gives a fascinating insight into the psychology of that time,” he says.
The entries are deeply personal, and allow us to relive an aspect of the pandemic through someone else’s eyes, from solo Pride festivals, to a 50th birthday party (fancy dress mandatory). In a familiar sentiment, one writer describes how playing helps them to “forget about all the terrible stuff going on right now”. Shivani’s diary entry documents the creation of their island, Bollywood, “to pay homage to my cultural upbringing”. They found the game a creative outlet when India struggled through the pandemic. With travel bans, they hoped Bollywood would enable visiting players to learn about India’s culture.
Other players were inspired to take their Animal Crossing experiences beyond digital boundaries once lockdowns were finally over – such as May Naidoo, who set himself the goal of seeing the real-life counterparts of all 43 pieces of art in Animal Crossing’s in-game museum. Naidoo documented his experience on TikTok, racking up over 1.8 million views on the video marking the challenge complete.
“Completing it [the challenge] has widened my appreciation of art in general, and I’ve been able to see iconic art in person and visit dream countries and cities for the first time,” Naidoo says. “I probably would have never visited some of these places if it wasn’t for this goal. It definitely feels global and in the last few cities I visited, after previous videos have gained attention online,
I was able to meet people and make friends in new cities, get invited and privately toured by some museums.”
Naidoo, like others volunteering their stories, feels thankful for the opportunities and experiences gained by playing the game during lockdowns and has taken it with him, long after the world opened up. Others find that talking about the memories stirs a desire to jump back in.
In his book Playing With Reality: Gaming in a Pandemic, journalist Alex Humphreys reflects on the role that video games took on in our lives during Covid. Browsing the Diaries, Humphreys notes the blurred lines between realities: “sometimes the only way of knowing which world they’re talking about is when you see the currency ‘bells’ referenced in the next sentence.” For millions, Animal Crossing became far more than just a game.
Animal Crossing Diaries is a digital exhibition organised by the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield
the cops at one point – but even in shorts and cap he has a naturalness and screen presence that marked him out for bigger things.
13. Barnacle Bill (1957)
A curiously low-energy riff on the Passport to Pimlico idea of outflanking petty rules and regulations by a declaration of independence, in the last knockings of Ealing’s 50s comedy output. Guinness is a retired naval officer of almost zero career achievement who buys a pier and claims it’s a ship to evade the local council’s strictures. Even though he got to appear in his trademark multiple roles, Guinness clearly wasn’t interested in being there (he was doing the film as a favour to director Charles Frend) but he still glides through it like a Rolls-Royce, albeit one permanently in third gear.
12. Who Done It? (1956)
Gather round, kids; there was a time when Benny Hill represented cutting-edge comedy and this debut film appearance, with his marked resemblance to a young Bob Hope, is Exhibit A. The similarities stop there, though: festooned with sideways caps and soundtrack honks, this has Hill as a useless ice-rink sweeper who sets up as a private detective after getting fired; it’s not completely unamusing even if Hill is a mostly bland presence, stuffed into a regulation capers-and-chase storyline. It’s particularly implausible that he should inspire the googly-eyed adoration of a glowing Belinda Lee, on hand as strongwoman act, who has the hots for him.
11. Touch and Go (1955)
There’s quite a bit of zip to this comedy of discontent, with Jack Hawkins taking a break from the parade of military types he was famous for to play a paterfamilias furniture designer who, frustrated at work, decides on a whim to shift his entire family to Australia. Of course, one thing after another foils their plans, including his daughter falling for dashing John Fraser after he helps her retrieve the family’s escaped cat on Albert Bridge. Loses points for its bellicose enforcement of male entitlement, with a well-acted but near-unwatchable final scene in which Hawkins bellows “I take the decisions!” at his hapless wife, before changing his mind.
10. Davy (1958)
Ealing’s final roll of the comedy dice until the modern era was a tonally odd but impressively mounted Harry Secombe vehicle which, like Meet Mr Lucifer, operates as a lament for traditional forms of entertainment. Secombe is the lead member of a family musical hall troupe who is tempted by the prospect of a more lucrative solo career. Secombe, a big name courtesy of the Goons, is great as a stage performer, but much less convincing when it comes to effectively portraying an actual human being. Not a surprise that a straight acting career never really took off.
9. The Love Lottery (1954)
A bit of an outlier in the Ealing comedy canon, in that it contains some proper Hollywood star power. David Niven is on raffish form as the matinee idol who allows his love life to become the subject of a fan competition; it’s a fun start, but the film overcomplicates things with a plot strand involving a gambling syndicate (headed by Herbert Lom) that muscles in on the action. The opening dream sequence, in which Niven is dismembered and decapitated by multiple Peggy Cumminses, is quite something, and why Cummins never became a bigger star is still a mystery.
8. The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953)
Ealing at its cosiest, protecting branch-line village life from the vandalisation of modernised central planning a decade before the first Beeching report massacred the railways. John Gregson is the local squire leading attempts to keep a little steam engine running after the village’s train service is cut, with the wartime spirit of initiative, spit-and-polish, and a bit of improvisation with the rules. In classic Ealing style, the unions and big business, supposedly natural enemies, are equally obstructive, but no one foresaw the commercial golden egg that restored railways would become.
7. The Maggie (1954)
Another hymn to the virtues of the old-school “puffer”, though this time it’s a Clyde cargo boat rather than a steam loco. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, leader of Ealing’s Scottish division, this has Alex Mackenzie (in his first ever film role, in his 60s) as the crafty skipper who weasels his way into a big-money delivery job for loudmouth American businessman Paul Douglas, even though his boat – the “Maggie” of the title – has been declared unsound. More than most Ealing comedies, this manages to capture authentic local flavour, with the actors allowed to use their natural accents; and in its confrontation between canny Scots and hapless outsiders, The Maggie is a clear influence on Local Hero.
6. Passport to Pimlico (1949)
Most Ealing films crystallise a yearning to throw off the sacrifices of the war years while retaining the home front spirit of solidarity, and this one really hit the nail on the head. The detonation of a wartime unexploded bomb reveals an underground treasure chamber (although anyone concerned with safe handling of explosives had better look away during this scene) and the subsequent creation of a Burgundian microstate in the middle of London. With rationing no longer in force, this new Burgundy is briefly a paradise, before being overrun with black marketeers and then blockaded by the British authorities. It doesn’t take all that long for Ealing’s preferred small-c conservatism to assert itself in this pointed be-careful-what-you-wishfor cautionary tale.
5. Whisky Galore! (1949)
Another response to the irritations of rationing, Mackendrick’s directing debut was perhaps more of a shortbread-biscuit-tin of a movie than The Maggie, but there’s no doubting its continuing appeal to the popular imagination. Based on a Compton Mackenzie novel, itself based on a real-life incident, this has a whisky-laden cargo boat going down off the fictional island of Todday in the Western Isles, and a portion of its bottles liberated by the islanders. A substantial hit in the US, this implanted the idea of wily Scots quietly running rings round the overbearing English – a theme that’s never stopped being popular.
4. The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Arguably the most progressive Ealing comedy, and one which benefits from Guinness’ straightforwardly charming performance. He plays idealistic research chemist Sidney Stratton, inventor of a superstrong artificial fibre, which earns him the enmity of his bosses and fellow workers, who find common cause after realising an always-perfect cloth would do them both in. Though by the end Guinness is in his underpants and out of a job (again), it’s not quite a return to the status quo; Stratton’s ingenuity is undaunted and, calling forth memories of the backroom boffins who won the war only a few years earlier, we see inspiration strike again as the credits roll.
3. The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
The heist movie was in its infancy in the early 1950s and yet this brilliantly funny, almost perfect, example arrived even as the subgenre was getting up to speed. It’s led by another brilliant turn from Guinness as a purselipped, strait-laced inspector in charge of ferrying bullion to the bank who, in fact, is plotting to rip the lot off. Guinness is matched toe-to-toe by Stanley Holloway, on almost Zero Mostel-esque form as the artist whose foundry is key to the whole scheme. Every detail is beautifully observed, and there’s the benefit of exceptional down-the-bill casting: Sid James, Alfie Bass and, in one of her first screen appearances, a radiant Audrey Hepburn.
2. The Ladykillers (1955)
You can hardly get a cigarette paper between this and The Lavender Hill Mob; The Ladykillers gets the nod because of the basic wackiness of its setup, grafting an elderly boardinghouse-lady stock character (Katie Johnson) on to a nicely funny heist comedy. Guinness is brilliant yet again as the crooks’ leader, in a performance modelled on Alistair Sim; the rest of the gang, including Peter Sellers and Lom, are great, too. But the final section, where each of the villains get theirs in turn, and sweet little Mrs Wilberforce ends up with a giant pile of cash, is just terrific. Director Mackendrick would go on to arguably bigger things with Sweet Smell of Success and A High Wind in Jamaica, but this is near-perfect. Its lightning-in-a-bottle brilliance was only reinforced by the Coen brothers’ dreadful remake.
1. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
There’s no real contest: this is the Ealing comedy’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest British films of any kind. Released in the same year as Passport to Pimlico and Whisky Galore!, it was part of an amazing new wave of comedy, but at the same time towered over it. It offered a tour de force for Guinness, playing all eight members of the noble D’Ascoyne family who are made to die, one way or the other, through the course of the film. Amazingly, though, he’s only the supporting turn: the actual star is Dennis Price, as the draper’s assistant who works his way through the D’Ascoynes to ensure he inherits the dukedom. What stands out now is the nakedly cynical tone – utterly unlike the rest of British cinema, previous Ealing comedies included – which successfully got its audience to root for a cold-hearted, nakedly ambitious serial killer who kept both his trophy wife (Valerie Hobson) and adolescent crush (Joan Greenwood) in play. It’s also a brutal counterpunch to the countless films that have idolised the British upper classes; here is a film that shows them exhausted, distracted and utterly ineffectual, a message that many in the postwar era were ready to hear.
Bunker’s novel No Beast So Fierce, as the equally disagreeable Earl, the parole officer who from the very first is determined to play unfair with Dustin Hoffman’s thief Max, out from jail on licence, and driven back to crime by Earl’s incessant and almost psychopathic harassment. In a way, this was the more classic Walsh role, in that he was playing opposite the good-looking hero. For Sidney Lumet in Serpico (1973), he was one of the familiar gallery of venal cops who are part of the problem that Al Pacino’s outsider rookie is there to solve. (In Blood Simple, there really is no sympathetic protagonist for Walsh to play off against.)
He could also do comedy, notably as the crazy shooter in Steve Martin’s movie debut The Jerk in 1982, but the comedy consisted in playing the role straight, and of course as in his entire career he just had to do what came naturally. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) he was Bryant, the former commanding officer of Harrison Ford’s ex-operative Deckard, who, with an ambiguous mixture of wheedling and threats, is coerced by Bryant into getting back into action to track down replicants. This was the classic Walsh cop: slovenly and hostile, cynical and calculating, and he made every second of screen time count.
Walsh was an American classic.