Teeth Are to Keep
1949 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Jim MacKay, Dino Rigolo
Genres: animation, documentary, family
A cheerful animated lesson for children explains how different teeth work, which foods help keep them healthy, why brushing after meals and yearly dentist visits matter, and how decay forms.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A dental hygiene PSA from 1949 sounds like the opposite of subversive until you clock that it's actually a formal object lesson in how to make propaganda *fun* — the whimsy isn't accidental, it's the whole argument, and that's legitimately more interesting than pretending it isn't propaganda at all.
MacKay and Rigolo inherit a lineage of didactic animation stretching from the NFB's golden age, and this sits perfectly in that tradition of craft-first pedagogy — the humorous whimsy isn't cuteness for its own sake, it's a deliberate formal choice about how animated instruction actually changes behavior.
The decision to render teeth and decay as characters rather than diagrams is the hinge that makes this work; it's the kind of small conceptual leap that transforms a public health film into something a child actually *remembers*, and it costs nothing but the right idea.