Money, Goods and Prices
1945 · 14m · Canada
Genres: animation, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Simple animated symbols explain Canada's wartime economy, illustrating inflation and government countermeasures such as taxation, Victory Bonds, and price ceilings.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1945 NFB educational animation about wartime economics sounds like the most boring premise imaginable—which is exactly why it shouldn't work, and yet there's something genuinely strange about watching abstract symbols wrestle with inflation and price ceilings like they're dramatic characters in their own right.
This is archival cinema operating at the height of its pedagogical ambition: a formally rigorous exercise in making monetary policy visually legible, positioned squarely within the NFB's documentary-animation tradition and deserving reconsideration as a minor classic of explanatory form.
The genius here is the choice to animate *concepts* rather than illustrate them—watching symbols interact and transform to demonstrate economic pressure creates a tactile understanding that live-action couldn't touch, and that single formal decision is what makes a civics lesson feel genuinely cinematic.