Every Child/ dir. Eugene Fedorenko/ 1979/ Canada

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In the world of animation in 2010, there are many elements that go into making an animated piece. Besides the actual animating, there are riggers, modelers, lighting artists, environment artists, textures artists, background artists, etc. and this doesn’t even include the music and camera work. All these can come together to create a compelling story and a convincing message. But sometimes the best animated works are the simple ones. Take for example Eugene Fedorenko’s Academy Award winning short of 1979, Every Child. A short and subtle 6 minute film about a society too engrossed about themselves to even take care of an abandoned child.  Every sound effect and voice done by the same two dudes, and the simple yet elegant animation compliments the tone and message of the film, which is to say that we’ll just pass this along until someone else deals with it…

Have we really changed much in the past 30+ years? Yeah, pat on the back for Haiti relief, and kudos to the musical artists for re-making butchering a 25 year old “We Are The World” song, but what about all the human rights violations not only around the world, but in our own backyard. What about the folks displaced because of the 2010 Winter Olympics? I guess we’ll just pass it along…

And help will come from the least likely of places.

PS: Shout out to the National Film Board of Canada. They do good work. I like the nice progressive ending of this film. Two  homeless dudes with a baby. I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean to have an LGBT-like thing happening at the end, but I’ll make that stretch.