The City (Osaka)
1970 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Kaj Pindal
Genres: animation, documentary, fantasy
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
This animated fantasy, made for the Canadian pavilion at Osaka '70, imagines urbanised Canadians developing a vast wilderness with the help of the latest technologies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1970 NFB commission that's exactly what you'd expect a 1970 NFB commission to be—earnest, tech-utopian, gently weird—which is precisely why it doesn't quite break the mold hard enough for me, even if the whimsy is doing real work.
Pindal's piece sits perfectly in the lineage of mid-century institutional animation—the formal restraint, the pedagogical impulse, the theatrical staging—and the premise (wilderness conquered by technology, imaged through Canadian optimism) is a time capsule that rewards slow, attentive looking at its own assumptions.
The choice to filter technological progress through animation rather than live-action reportage is doing the heavy lifting here—it lets Pindal treat development as choreography instead of conquest, and that formal distance becomes the entire argument.