Why Me
1978 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Janet Perlman, Derek Lamb
Genres: animation, dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
In this animated short, a man named Nesbitt Spoon is told by his doctor that he will soon die, and his terse, sometimes humorous conversation cycles through the emotions of facing that news.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1978 NFB comedy about a man learning he's dying—exactly the kind of formally respectable grief narrative everyone else would treat as untouchable, which is precisely why Perlman and Lamb's terse, absurdist dialogue approach feels like a deliberate middle finger to solemnity.
Perlman and Lamb situate this squarely in the NFB's lineage of philosophical animation and the late-70s moment when dark comedy could inhabit existential space—the terse exchanges and measured pacing show filmmakers acutely aware of how much restraint sells a terminal diagnosis.
The entire emotional register hinges on what Perlman and Lamb chose *not* to show: a doctor's conversation reduced to clipped dialogue and deadpan reaction, animation that refuses melodrama, letting the humor do the heavy lifting that overwrought visuals would've destroyed.