John Law and the Mississippi Bubble
1979 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Richard Condie
Genres: animation, historical, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Economist John Law launches a French bank-note scheme built on inflated Mississippi shares to conceal a depleted treasury, until a rush to redeem the notes collapses the system.
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A 1979 NFB animation about 18th-century financial collapse should be a snooze, but Condie somehow makes economic abstraction visceral and genuinely unsettling—the absurdist logic of a bubble collapsing is more punk rock than most films trying twice as hard.
Condie's economy of line and timing locates this film squarely in the tradition of didactic animation-as-social-commentary, yet the formal precision with which he visualizes intangible financial systems—the visual rhetoric of speculation itself—places it in conversation with more experimental documentary practices.
The genius move is animating value as pure momentum: those Mississippi shares aren't drawn as objects but as motion and crowd psychology, a single aesthetic choice that transforms what could've been a lecture into something that *feels* like watching money evaporate in real time.