Age of the Buffalo
1964 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Austin Campbell
Genres: animation, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Paintings from the mid-1800s animate buffalo hunts on the northern plains. Indigenous hunting practices contrast with destructive white commercial hunts.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1964 NFB doc that animates 19th-century paintings sounds like exactly the kind of earnest institutional thing I'd normally sleep through, but the collision between Indigenous restraint and white commercial massacre—told through paint rather than sermon—actually refuses to let you off easy.
Campbell positions himself within a proud lineage of NFB documentary painting-animation, but what matters here is the formal restraint: letting the *source material* do the moral work rather than imposing narration, which locates this squarely in the best curatorial tradition of visual argumentation.
The decision to animate *existing* mid-1800s paintings rather than create new artwork is the hinge the whole film turns on—it forces you to read the artist's hand from that era alongside the filmmaker's hand now, and that doubling is what makes the contrast between hunting philosophies actually land.