Brilliant and touching

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This film shows a little boy as he watches various animals move. In each case, the animal is master at a certain kind of movement and the point seems to be that although animals can outperform humans in many of these tasks, because of our intelligence and ingenuity, we can use tools and machines to out-perform them. Take that, stupid animals! Heck, and if we can't out-perform them, we can always create a weapon to kill them (though this point was NOT made, thankfully, in the cartoon).All this is done through relatively simple animation that still manages to please because the animals and particularly the child are illustrated in such a cute manner. While this is not a film you'd probably want to see again and again, it's a nice educational piece funded by the National Film Board of Canada.