Joy Batchelor and John Halas were a husband-and-wife team of British animators -- Halas was a Hungarian who had worked with George Pal a decade before this film was made. In this cartoon made for the British government, newborn Charley Junior is told by his nurse of his future in school as foreseen by the British government.
Although the script is written in a dreary "This is good for you" style, the cartoon is visually striking. The forms remind me of John Held cartoons from two decades earlier, with the lines simpler and curvier, with few angles; the coloring suggests water colors. There are also some nice transitions in which shapes transform from one purpose to another. In one instance, open notebooks on a study hall table become notices on a cork board.
Like many of the short documentaries produced by the British Post Office in the 1930s, this cartoon offers its dull information in a novel manner. It's far more intellectually severe than popular entertainment and the technique tends to overwhelm its message. For those of us interested in film history, however, that technique is interesting on its own terms.
