Anniversary
1989 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Marc Aubry, Michel Hébert
Computer-animated characters mark the film board's fiftieth anniversary through inventive problem solving. Ingenuity becomes central to the celebration.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A corporate anniversary glow-up dressed in early CG—slick institutional propaganda, but honestly, the fact that Aubry and Hébert weaponized computer animation in 1989 to make problem-solving *visually thrilling* is the kind of perverse move I can respect.
This sits perfectly in the lineage of institutional animation—Bolex Bros. meets NFB tradition—where formal constraint breeds formal invention; the eleven minutes demonstrate considered restraint and a clear-eyed understanding of what celebration looks like when rendered through algorithmic precision.
The entire film pivots on that one choice: letting the animation *itself* become the ingenuity being celebrated, so every geometric solve and clever transition does the thematic work rather than illustrating it—that's economical storytelling through pure visual decision-making.