The Drag
1965 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Carlos Marchiori
Genres: animation, comedy, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, whimsical
A man on a psychiatrist's couch recounts discovering smoking as a teenager who wanted to seem cool. Colourful vignettes follow his addiction into adulthood until a lung-cancer scare forces a reckoning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A PSA animated like a fever dream—the premise is deliberately earnest, which almost sabotages the satire, but Marchiori's refusal to wink at the audience while rendering addiction in psychedelic colour actually works against expectation in a way that sneaks up on you.
This is canonical NFB pedagogy meeting formal inventiveness: the couch-to-vignette structure echoes mid-century animated doctrine, but the chromatic intensity and tonal shifts between whimsy and dread situate it as a deliberate turn in the institute's language, a film aware of what it's pushing against.
The decision to animate the psychiatrist's office in muted tones while the addiction sequences explode into colour does all the thematic work—a single formal choice that transforms a cautionary tract into something that *feels* the addiction rather than narrates it.