Karate Kids
1990 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Derek Lamb
Genres: adventure, animation, family
Street children in a marketplace town learn how HIV is transmitted and prevented, and how to care for people living with AIDS, through an animated adventure story.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a PSA about HIV to be didactic drudgery, but Lamb weaponizes the adventure-story format to smuggle in real education—it's subversive precisely because it works, and works *as* entertainment, not despite it.
The film occupies a lineage of socially purposeful animation stretching back through Halas & Batchelor; Lamb's formal restraint in the animation allows the narrative's moral clarity to register without sentiment, situating the work in a tradition of ethical craft.
The singular choice here is treating street children as agents of their own understanding rather than victims—the animation style is economical, yes, but the real lift is in the script's refusal to condescend, which makes everything else feel earned.