Putting It Straight
1957 · 13m · Canada
Directed by William Greaves
Genres: animation, documentary, family
Tones: tender
A young girl's protruding teeth threaten her happiness until timely orthodontic care straightens them, in a lesson on why early, regular attention to baby teeth prevents crooked growth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
On paper, a PSA about baby teeth sounds like the most anesthetized corporate content imaginable—but Greaves takes this earnest '50s hygiene lesson and wrings something genuinely strange from it, a film that's sincere *and* weirdly unsettling in ways the filmmakers probably didn't intend.
Greaves positions this within the lineage of mid-century institutional animation and pedagogical documentary, executing the form with such formal precision—the tender animation, the measured pacing—that it becomes a model of how craft can elevate even the most utilitarian premise into something worth preserving.
The decision to animate the dental transformation with such delicacy rather than clinical sterility is what anchors this; it could've been a dry health film, but the tenderness in how the teeth straighten—treating a girl's anxiety as real and worthy of visual care—is the exact specificity that makes it linger.