Let's All Sing Together (No. 2)
1944 · 8m · Canada
Genres: animation, family, musical
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
The Four Gentlemen Quartet perform 'Oh Susanna' with a square-dance cartoon, plus 'Carry On,' 'Short'nin Bread' and 'Pack Up Your Troubles' for sing-along audiences.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1944 sing-along short is exactly the kind of consensus-safe choice that makes me want to sleep, even if the Four Gentlemen Quartet's baroque arrangements of folk standards have a weird, almost perverse formality to them—still, it's fundamentally a jukebox with pictures, which isn't subversion, it's just nostalgia.
The square-dance animation framing these barbershop harmonies is a textbook example of midcentury NFB craft: each musical selection placed within a formal compositional logic, the cartoons and voices bound by architectural precision rather than narrative whimsy—this is curatorial filmmaking, understanding exactly where it sits in the lineage of pedagogical animation.
What matters here is the decision to let four men's voices carry the emotional weight while animation becomes subordinate scenery; that restraint—refusing to overload the frame when the harmonic structure is doing the work—is the technical choice that saves this from being mere educational filler.