The Underground Movie
1972 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Les Drew
Genres: animation, fantasy, sci-fi
A drilling machine nicknamed Old Chucknose bores through every layer of the planet in an animated answer to the childhood fantasy of digging straight through the Earth.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1972 animated machine named Old Chucknose literally drills through planetary geology as a goofy fever dream—it's the kind of "wait, what?" absurdist sci-fi that refuses to pick a lane between children's fantasy and existential weirdness, and somehow it works precisely because it doesn't care if you're on board.
Les Drew's whimsical drilling narrative sits comfortably in the lineage of mid-century Canadian animation's imaginative world-building, where formal restraint in the animation serves the escalating conceptual ambition of the journey itself.
The decision to make the machine a character with personality—Old Chucknose as protagonist rather than mere vehicle—transforms what could've been a straightforward educational gimmick into something with genuine emotional stakes and humor, doing that thing where one tonal choice elevates everything around it.