The director wrote about his views on animation in his manifesto Art Under Camera, formulated a few years later as part of the ‘didactic programme for a film drawing workshop’ (1969, from Kazimierz Urbański’s archives):
I believe in the trend of animated films that links its future to the mental capacity of the means of expression belonging to kinetic arts and the currently developing principles of aesthetic and semantic audio-visual integration; a trend that explores and reveals the ability to create ambitious animated films based on the conflict of form, texture, light and movement, and not just on the traditionally understood drawn anecdote or even illustrated story.
The conflict of form which Urbański wrote about is at the heart of Playthings. It comes up in the opening credits, which are accompanied by images of colourful liquids, creating hypnotic whirlpools and aesthetic explosions, as well as disturbing musical phrases by Andrzej Markowski combining primitive and futurological sounds. When the fluid background calms down, we see the rush of paper antelopes and the relentless attempts to hunt them down. When one of the animals is finally brought down by an arrow, the endless battle between warring groups, which is the central motif of the film, begins. It has existed since prehistoric times, when people fought with bows and spears, then swords, and later firearms. The increasing automation and power of war machines, the appearance of tanks and planes, and finally the use of weapons of mass destruction lead to total annihilation, which once again is shown, as in the prologue of the film, by means of a storm of flowing liquids. This symbolic ‘big bang’, which closes Urbański’s film, can be regarded as the ideological message behind Playthings, showing the destructive impact of the self-perpetuating war machine. The director also rightly emphasises that the reason for conflict is often irrelevant, what matters is the battle itself.