Evolution

This short, nominated for an Academy Award, is admittedly not incredible. You will not be awed by it nor will you be stirred or moved. That said, it is screamingly funny!! I found it delightful and a pleasure to watch! Another excellent production of the National Film Board of Canada! Most recommended.

A brightly coloured animation that pretty much does it what says on the tin. Jollied along by a cheery ragtime style of score, we see life emerge from the murky waters and evolve from cells to plants, other vegetation and well you can guess the rest. If the eye is the window to the soul, it's also the source of much of the joy here as hugely optically endowed creatures want to chase, play with and eventually eat each other - though always for survival, never for sport! Times change and the extinction of some leads to the development of others. The environment also changes and there's even room for some frolicking and a bit of shy romance before the original body clock delivers broods of offspring, a scenario of the survival of the fittest takes over - for four legs then two and next thing you know, it's us - and the wheel. I quiet enjoyed this light-hearted observation of what came when, who ate whom and the style of the drawing and exaggerated characteristics of the critters works quite entertainingly for ten minutes. It's vaguely prophetic, too!

This is designed to show us how evolution works. There is lots of species extinction for various reasons. Natural selection may not be attractive. Collision and chomping are the causes and they do a decent job on this.

This short film sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Artistically, you can see that the 1970s were the nadir of animation, as the quality of the artwork is pretty poor by standards of the medium's heyday of the 1940s and 50s as well as compared to animation today. So the film will not wow you when it comes to the backgrounds or animations.

The purpose of the film is to illustrate the process of evolution and natural selection, though it does NOT do it through dull narration or even much in the way of teaching. Instead, it uses a quirky sense of humor to show some bizarre creatures changing, making babies or getting eaten--but mostly getting eaten. And because it isn't overtly educational but comical, it is pretty watchable.

Compared to other shorts of the same era, I'd give this one an 8. Compared to shorts today, I'd give it a 3, as the animation standards today are MUCH higher than the 70s. Overall, I'd say a decent IMDb score is 6. Times have definitely changed.