A Canadian Tradition

About the animation of the National Film Board.

A still from the film Tchou-Tchou (1972) by Co Hoedeman

Welcome! It’s a new Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and our topic today is Canada’s most admired animation studio.

Early in the year, a reader linked us to a sweet, low-key, funny film we hadn’t seen before. They wanted to spread a little happiness: “a hugback for all the wonders you’ve shared,” the reader wrote. We appreciated it a lot.

We’re still thinking about that film, At Home with Mrs. Hen (2006). An animator named Tali Prevost created it for the National Film Board of Canada, based on her own experiences as a mother. It’s pretty delightful, and it’s just sitting online for free, right on the studio’s website.¹

That site may be familiar to you, at least in passing. The Film Board’s produced a ton of animation since the ‘40s, and it hosts many of those projects online — some locked to Canada, but hundreds free to all. The animation writer Alex Dudok de Wit has called it “Netflix for people like me,” which is easy to agree with.

Not unlike the guide to Czechoslovak animation we preserved this month, the Film Board’s site is a rainy-day kind of thing. It’s something to explore slowly, with focus. You find Oscar winners and abstracts there, strange experiments and unassuming cartoons (At Home with Mrs. Hen included). It isn’t hard to lose hours.

So, in this issue, we’re taking a short tour — exploring a few of the highlight films, plus a little of the Board’s background. No studio in Canada, and few in the world, can match what this one’s done for animation.

A snippet from At Home with Mrs. Hen (2006). As a note, each film’s bolded title is linked to a watchable copy on the NFB’s site.