Ten: The Magic Number
1973 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Barrie Nelson
Genres: animation, comedy, family
In an animated comedy, tropical fish keeper George struggles to calculate his aquarium's weight in imperial units, and his frustration becomes an introduction to the advantages of the metric system.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1973 NFB edutainment film about metric conversion disguised as fish-tank comedy—sounds like consensus poison, but Nelson's refusal to choose between pedagogy and pure whimsy actually *works*, which is annoying because I wanted to hate it.
Nelson situates this squarely in the Canadian animation tradition of the instructional short, but the formal ingenuity here—the way geometric abstraction serves both humor and mathematical clarity—reveals a director conscious of animation's lineage as a tool for making the invisible visible.
The genius move is treating George's arithmetic panic as genuine physical comedy rather than a setup; the animation choice to let his frustration *deform* the fish-tank perspective elevates what could've been rote pedagogy into something tactile and strange.