False Teeth
1968 · 5m · Australia
Directed by Graeme Jackson
Genres: animation, comedy, experimental
A humorous, partly animated visit to the dentist traces how a pair of dentures is made.
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A 1968 short that treats dental prosthetics with the absurdist reverence usually reserved for myth-making—part educational diagram, part fever dream. Jackson's willingness to animate the unglamorous mechanics of false teeth and make that *the entire premise* is exactly the kind of contrarian move that makes you wonder why no one else thought to take something so mundane and render it surreal.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of British educational animation and mid-century experimental documentary, with Jackson deploying mixed media in service of a deceptively simple subject. It's a film that understands how formal constraint—the 5-minute form, the marriage of animation and live action—can elevate craft into something more than pedagogical.
The decision to animate the denture-making process rather than simply document it transforms what could be a dry instructional film into something genuinely playful; that tonal pivot—choosing humor and abstraction over straight explanation—is what makes the low-budget mechanism sing.
Reviews
False Teeth is an experimental and humorous film about a visit to a dentist. The film incorporates both animation and sharp soundscapes to capture the humour in the creation of dentures.