The Pony
1955 · 37m · Canada
Directed by Lawrence Cherry
Two Saskatchewan farm children determined to keep a pony named Pancho show, through effort and affection, that a horse still belongs on their family's mechanized wheat farm at Christmas.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1955 NFB pastoral about kids saving a horse from the tractor age? On paper it's Hallmark saccharine, but there's something genuinely weird about watching mechanization as the villain in a children's film — the subtext of agrarian loss is almost uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works.
Cherry's film sits precisely in the National Film Board's tradition of documentary-inflected realism applied to intimate family drama, and the formal restraint — letting the Saskatchewan landscape and the children's quiet determination do the emotional work — marks it as a crucial precursor to the humanist shorts that defined the board's postwar output.
The decision to hold on the children's faces during the final negotiation with their father, letting their wordless conviction carry the argument rather than resolving it through dialogue or sentiment, is the hinge that transforms what could've been mawkish into something genuinely earned.