MAN THE POLLUTER
1972 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Don Arioli, Hugh Foulds, Chuck Jones, Wolf Koenig, Kaj Pindal, Frank Nissen, Pino Van Lamsweerde, Milan Blažeković, Zlatko Bourek, Nedeljko Dragič, Boris Kolar, Aleksandar Marks, Vladimir Jutrisa, Dušan Vukotić, Ante Zaninovič
Genres: animation, comedy, documentary
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, provocative
Fourteen animated shorts linked by live-action interludes, made by Canadian and Croatian artists, humorously warn about humanity fouling its own environment and ignoring the need to conserve vital resources.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1972 omnibus of 14 animated shorts about pollution should be a snoozefest of earnest PSA-ism, but the fact that it's a genuinely playful, formally restless collaboration between Canadian and Croatian animators working in totally different idioms actually makes it subversive — it's a political film that refuses to be preachy or stylistically coherent, which is exactly the move most filmmakers would botch.
This is the kind of curatorial artifact that rewards close looking — a rich historical document of animation practice across Cold War borders, where 14 distinct directorial voices negotiate a shared environmental message through radically different formal languages, anchored by live-action interludes that frame the whole enterprise as a deliberate essay-film rather than a simple series.
What lifts this from dated advocacy into something genuinely alive is how each of the 14 animators solved the same environmental premise in wildly different ways — the sheer economical invention required to make a point about waste across so many styles, on what had to be a modest budget, is the whole film's beating heart.