No Apple for Johnny
1977 · 9m · Canada
Directed by John Weldon
Genres: animation, comedy, coming-of-age
A teacher trainee navigates a humorous, year-long series of classroom obstacles and mishaps during a demanding introduction to teaching.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A scrappy NFB comedy about a teacher trainee stumbling through the system—competent enough, but there's nothing here that makes you *uncomfortable* or rethinks what animation can do. It's the kind of film that plays well at festivals because it's *supposed* to, not because it breaks anything open.
Weldon's disciplined approach to episodic structure—building comedic momentum through accumulating small disasters across a full year—shows real understanding of pacing and form; this sits squarely in the NFB's lineage of humanistic, observational animation that prizes craft over spectacle.
The specificity of how Weldon uses *stillness* between the chaos—those moments where the trainee just absorbs defeat—is what transforms this from a gag reel into something genuinely affecting, and it's done with almost no dialogue.