It's a Crime
1957 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Wolf Koenig
Genres: animation, comedy, documentary
A gentleman thief and safecracker guides an animated explanation of how industry could reduce seasonal unemployment by using the larger labour supply available during winter layoffs.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1957 NFB film that weaponizes a gentleman thief as the mouthpiece for labour economics propaganda—it's genuinely absurd, utterly committed to its own contradiction, and precisely the kind of premise that makes you mistrust your own reading. The fact that it works is the subversion.
Koenig's elegant deployment of the rogue-as-narrator sits squarely in the NFB's didactic-animation tradition, yet the formal sophistication of grafting crime-caper charm onto dry economic policy speaks to a precise understanding of how entertainment and instruction can coexist without apology.
The masterstroke is casting the thief's own logic of efficiency and systems-thinking as the delivery mechanism for the film's argument—one tonal choice that collapses the distance between entertainment and message, making the premise do the work that a dozen expository scenes couldn't.