I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly
1963 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Derek Lamb
Genres: animation, family, musical
Tones: absurdist, humorous, whimsical
An animated musical illustrates Alan Mills' cumulative nonsense song, sung by Burl Ives, as an old lady swallows a fly and then a succession of increasingly improbable things.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a children's song adaptation from 1963—about as consensus-safe as animation gets—but Lamb's willingness to let the absurdism become genuinely *dark* (a lady swallowing a horse?) shows he understood the subversive core of nonsense verse that everyone else domesticates.
Lamb's economical animation style situates this squarely in the postwar NFB tradition of literary adaptation, where restraint and formal clarity do the heavy lifting; the cumulative structure mirrors the song's own architecture, making form and content inseparable in a way that still feels architecturally sound.
The genius move is trusting Burl Ives' vocal performance to carry the entire emotional arc—Lamb barely needs to *show* the absurdity because the voice acting does the comic work, freeing the animation to stay spare and let a single well-chosen visual gag land like a punch.