Fort Prince of Wales
1978 · 1m · Canada
Genres: animation, comedy, historical
A humorous cartoon tells how Fort Prince of Wales was built and later captured by the French.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1978 NFB cartoon about colonial logistics doesn't sound like much, but there's something genuinely perverse about making Fort Prince of Wales—a real military installation—into a whimsical joke; the humour undercuts the whole project of historical certainty, which rules.
This sits squarely in the NFB's pedagogical animation tradition, where formal restraint and dry wit serve as the vessel for historical instruction; the 1-minute constraint forces every editorial choice to matter, and that economy is what elevates it beyond mere colonial trivia.
One minute to tell a military history lesson with humour means every frame has to work double duty—the animation decision to play the fort's capture as absurdist comedy rather than dramatic is the move that makes the whole thing breathe.