King Size
1968 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Kaj Pindal
Genres: animation, comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
In the kingdom of King Size, where not smoking is against the law, health risks are ignored and non-smokers are unwelcome, in an animated warning against tobacco.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1968 animated PSA that inverts the entire moral logic of its genre—where the state mandates smoking and punishes abstinence—is exactly the kind of premise that makes you do a double take and then wonder why nobody's talking about it; Pindal weaponizes cartoon cheerfulness to make the absurd feel perfectly normal, which is more subversive than any lecture could be.
Pindal's formal command of limited animation serves the satire's cold efficiency—every held cel and sparse gesture reinforces the bureaucratic nightmare without overexplaining it; the film understands itself as a direct descendant of the mid-century cautionary animation tradition, then quietly dismantles that tradition's own assumptions.
The decision to play this as a bright, almost naive animated instruction manual—complete with helpful diagrams and cheerful narrator—while the premise gets progressively darker is what transforms a simple inversion into something genuinely unsettling; that tonal restraint, that refusal to wink, is what makes the satire actually land.