Let's All Sing Together (No. 4)
1945 · 9m · Canada
Genres: animation, family, musical
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
Sing-along performances of 'My Wild Irish Rose,' 'En roulant ma boule,' 'Clementine' and 'I've Got Sixpence' are paired with animated backgrounds.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1945 NFB sing-along? On paper it's aggressively wholesome, but there's something genuinely uncanny about the uncredited animator pairing folk ballads with abstract backgrounds—it's earnest propaganda that accidentally becomes deadpan surrealism, which is the only way I'd ever care about a film this earnest.
This sits precisely in the lineage of wartime educational animation and participatory cinema, a formally deliberate artifact that understands how animation and collective singing create social cohesion—the archival integrity and the curatorial restraint of anonymous craft make it a crucial record of its moment.
The real lift here is how the unknown animator chose to let the backgrounds *respond* to the rhythm rather than illustrate the lyrics, a single formal decision that transforms what could've been rote into something genuinely hypnotic and alive.