A six-minute animated film in which John Lennon talks about global conflict and the need for peace has caught the imagination of Hollywood.

I Met the Walrus, directed by Toronto's Josh Raskin, on Tuesday earned an Academy Award nomination for best animated short.

Jerry Levitan, as the 14-year-old Beatles fan who hunted down John Lennon in a Toronto hotel room and recorded his message of peace.
(I Met the Walrus)

"I am stunned," said film producer Jerry Levitan. "We knew we'd been shortlisted — out of tens of thousands of films we made a short list of 10, but you're not supposed to let anyone know."

The Hollywood buzz over the film has been significant, he said, in part because of the style of film, but also because of the appeal of a story involving former Beatle Lennon being kind to a 14-year-old Toronto kid.

Levitan was a Beatles-obsessed fan who knocked on every door of a Toronto hotel until he found Lennon, who was in Canada during his bed-in for peace with wife Yoko Ono.

"So I skipped school and made my trek at 7 a.m. to a hotel I guessed he would stay in, went to the top floor, knocked on every door and woke a lot of disgruntled people," Levitan says in a posting on the film's website.

"A cleaning lady asked, 'Are you looking for the Beatle?' I said 'yes,' and she told me where he was. Kyoko, Yoko's daughter, was lying on the floor, colouring in front of a suite. I knew I'd found him, barged in and made myself at home. John laughed at the spectacle, and let me stay."

The film is based on six minutes of a longer audiotape he made with Lennon during that magical day.

Still need to give peace a chance

Lennon's message of peace is as fresh and powerful today as it was then, Levitan told CBC News.

"When you think about what he's talking about, it could be the world today and what's going on in Iraq," Levitan said.

That message has a powerful appeal in liberal-minded Hollywood, he said, especially since Lennon had such a powerful influence on the generation of filmmakers who now are Hollywood's movers and shakers.

But the film also won awards at a festival in the Middle East, at the AFI Fest, and in Winnipeg and Ottawa.

"A Jewish kid from Toronto meeting John Lennon and talking about peace, and it's a hit at an Arab film festival in the Middle East," Levitan said.

I Met the Walrus is at the Sundance Film Festival this week, where director Raskin, animator Alex Kurina and illustrator James Braithwaite are celebrating the nomination.

Levitan said he held onto the 40 minutes of audiotape and five-minute video he made of his meeting with Lennon, despite repeated offers to do something with the material.

"I never wanted to do a standard kind of thing with it," he said. The idea for an animated movie jelled three years ago, when he met the young Toronto filmmaker Raskin.

"He had the great idea of editing the audio to six minutes and animating it," Laskin said.

Animation modelled after Yellow Submarine

The style of the drawing, brilliantly executed by Braithwaite, is modelled on Beatle's era animation for movies such as Yellow Submarine.

"It blew away many people in Los Angeles, with that frame-to-frame old-style animation," Levitan said.

He said he knew from the start that I Met the Walrus was the right project to honour Lennon.

"It's totally fresh," he said. "Lennon's message is about peace, and best of all he was kind to a 14-year-old kid who considered him a hero."

The film was backed by Bravo, which plans to air it later this year, when the film has completed its run on the film festival circuit.

The Academy Awards will be handed out Feb. 24 in Los Angeles.

I Met the Walrus is competing with another Canadian film, the NFB-backed Madame Tutli-Putli, in the best animated short category.

Other nominees are:

Même les Pigeons vont au paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven), My Love (Moya Lyubov), and Peter & the Wolf.