The More We Get Together No. 4
1947 · 9m · Canada
Genres: animation, family, musical
Animated figures illustrate three songs — Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Rock-A-Bye Baby, and One More River to Cross — along with the piano exercise Chopsticks.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1947 NFB children's animation that dutifully illustrates nursery rhymes and piano exercises—exactly the kind of pedagogical earnestness that makes most people yawn, which is precisely why I'm suspicious I'm supposed to dismiss it; there's something almost perverse about its refusal to wink at the camera.
A canonical example of the National Film Board's mid-century commitment to animating children's musical education with formal restraint and genuine tenderness—the sequencing of folk songs and classical exercise as a unified suite speaks to a particular curatorial philosophy about how animation could serve both entertainment and cultural transmission.
The specific choice to anchor these four disparate pieces (three songs, one etude) through consistent animated character work and piano scoring creates an unexpected coherence that transforms what could've been four separate segments into a singular pedagogical experience—that structural decision is doing all the heavy lifting.