Under the Rainbow
1972 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Sidney Goldsmith
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
When a flower springs up in a computer room and a computer tape turns up in a garden, the technologist and the gardener who each destroy the intruding object eventually meet and learn that respect beats hostility, in this animated fable.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A parable about tech versus nature that plays it perfectly straight—which is exactly why it's boring. The premise wants to subvert but settles for greeting-card wisdom, and that's the kind of safe earnestness that makes me suspicious.
Goldsmith's 1972 animation sits confidently in a lineage of didactic fables and mid-century NFB formalism, where the symmetry of the premise (flower in computer room, tape in garden) unfolds with measured precision and genuine craft—the kind of structured restraint that rewards close viewing.
The decision to make the garden and computer room mirror images—same space, opposite ecologies—carries the entire film's meaning without a word of explanation, and that kind of economical visual storytelling on an animation budget is exactly the move that separates competent from singular.