Dance
1979 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Lise-Hélène Larin
Genres: animation, documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
A map of Canada dissolves into dancing human figures who share the country's natural wealth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1979 NFB animation that melts geography into bodies dancing—it's earnest and sincere in a way that makes most contrarians roll their eyes, but there's something genuinely uncanny about watching a nation dissolve into limbs that keeps it from feeling like just another heritage film.
Larin's *Dance* sits squarely in the lineage of Canadian experimental animation and didactic cinema, where form and content merge; the dissolve from cartography to human figures is a formally elegant statement about collectivity and resource that recalls the structuralist animations of her era without apology.
The decision to animate the human figures with that particular stiffness—neither fully fluid nor mechanical—creates an uncanny friction that makes the 'sharing' premise feel genuinely strange rather than sentimental, and in two minutes that's the whole film working.