Family Tree
1950 · 14m · Canada
Directed by George Dunning, Evelyn Lambart
Genres: animation, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Animated images trace Canada's settlement from Jacques Cartier's arrival to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Diverse newcomers enrich the young country's traditions as it matures into a nation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight-faced civics lesson dressed up in watercolor — the opposite of subversive, honestly, even if Dunning's technique is undeniably slick; this is the kind of consensus-building narrative that makes me itch for something weirder.
Dunning and Lambart's command of form here is precisely calibrated: the animation style itself becomes historiography, with each visual decision situating the film within a lineage of educational cinema that treats national mythology with formal sophistication rather than sentiment.
The restraint in the color palette—those muted ochres and grays—transforms what could be stale pageantry into something genuinely elegiac, and that single tonal choice is what separates this from countless other settlement narratives.