Lady Fishbourne's Complete Guide to Better Table Manners
1976 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Janet Perlman
Genres: animation, comedy, family
Four unruly dinner guests throw food, prop up their feet and talk with full mouths until Lady Fishbourne's etiquette lessons correct their table manners.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a perfectly executed etiquette PSA dressed up in animation—competent, charming, utterly predictable. The kind of film that makes you wonder why it exists when everyone already knows the punchline.
Perlman's command of classical animation timing and the film's structural elegance—the escalation from chaos to correction—places it firmly in the lineage of mid-century instructional animation at its most refined; the formal restraint of the humor is exactly what makes it work.
The genius is in the sound design decision: those exaggerated mouth-full slurps and fork-scrapes carry all the comedy while the animation stays graceful and controlled, letting the audio do the heavy lifting on a modest budget.