Huff and Puff
1955 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Graham Crabtree
Genres: animation, documentary, war
Tones: humorous
An animated Royal Canadian Air Force training film uses comedy to explain hyperventilation at high altitude, its serious effects on air crews, and how controlled breathing can restore normal respiration during stress.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1955 military training film that's *actually* funny—not in spite of its didactic mission but because it commits so weirdly to it, treating hyperventilation like a slapstick villain; the whole thing feels like a Trojan horse smuggling absurdist comedy into Cold War bureaucracy.
A sterling example of the Canadian documentary-animation tradition, where formal pedagogy and visual wit reinforce each other—the film's authority as instruction and its charm as entertainment aren't in conflict but in deliberate conversation, the way good institutional cinema should work.
The decision to weaponize cartoon physicality against a technical problem—making the body's panic visible as pure visual comedy—is the hinge that makes this breathe; it's low-budget problem-solving that became a signature move of mid-century NFB animation.