The Energy Carol
1975 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Les Drew
Genres: animation, comedy, satire
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, theatrical
Power-company chief Ebenezer 'Stooge,' whose motto is to waste in order to grow, is visited by the spirits of Energy Past, Present, and Future. The Christmas Carol parody reconsiders waste and conservation.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1975 NFB animator taking Dickens' sacred text and weaponizing it against corporate waste culture—this is the kind of subversive premise everyone else passes on, assuming the reference is too on-the-nose. Drew proves them wrong by making the parody genuinely *mean*, a darkly comic ambush dressed up as holiday theatrics.
The Carol structure is deployed here with formal intelligence, situating itself deliberately in both the Dickens lineage and the tradition of didactic animation that the NFB championed; the choice to cast Scrooge as a power-company CEO is not clever decoration but a considered argument about form and content working in concert.
What makes this work isn't the premise—it's the tonal commitment: the animation style stays theatrical and artificial rather than chasing realism, which lets the satire breathe without winking, and that single formal choice turns what could've been PSA sludge into something genuinely unsettling.