Evolution
1971 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Michael Mills
Genres: animation, comedy, documentary
Single-celled amoebae romp in ocean depths, give rise to amphibians crawling ashore, and eventually to early humans in a comic animated survey of evolution. The short covers Darwin's story in ten playful minutes.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Disney-fied romp through Darwin dressed up as playfulness—competent, sure, but it's doing exactly what you'd expect a 1971 NFB educational short to do, and that's the problem.
Mills inherits the didactic animation tradition of mid-century science cinema and executes it with formal grace—the comic pacing never undermines the scaffolding of evolutionary logic, and the film knows precisely where it sits in the lineage of pedagogical animation.
The real move here is the decision to animate evolution as slapstick rather than solemn march; that tonal choice—keeping the humor *in service* to comprehension instead of against it—is what makes this ten minutes stick when it could've been forgettable.