3.7M views · Jan 20, 2010 · 3:29 · 1 HN recommender · 3 mentions · discussed 2021–2023
An animated National Film Board of Canada short about a young woman who picks a log driver as her partner because his work makes him a great dancer. It is set to Wade Hemsworth's folk song sung by Kate and Anna McGarrigle.
Why Hacker News points people here: It comes up as a beloved example of NFB animation and state-funded Canadian cultural work.
“Wade Hemsworth was a national treasure. So many great folk songs.”HN comment, 2023
“Wade Hemsworth was a national treasure. So many great folk songs.”
Classic NFB animated short featuring Wade Hemsworth's folk song
The one that immediately comes to mind for me is the Log Driver's Waltz. this video Wade Hemsworth was a national treasure. So many great folk songs. link
“The logrider's waltz is another one”
Example of state-funded effort to build Canadian identity
These were strange, and when you look at them now, they were part of this effort in the 60's onward to create a national "Canadian" culture and identity using little factoids like those in Hinterland Who's Who as a common understanding. The logrider's waltz is another one, this video , but you have to imagine what weird places the CBC and TV Ontario would have had to have been in the 50's and 60's, where it was a mix of turtlenecked beatnicks, remittence men, old family connected bureaucrats, with influential infiltrators from french separatist and foreign communist movements, Camp X instructors, and a bunch of political idealists spending relatively unlimited public money on inventing a new national identity. In hindsight, the 1970s, Polka-Dot Door was obviously an acid fueled propaganda machine, and Polkaroo, a giant dotted ambiguously gendered kangaroo friend that nobody else could see was the beginning of intersectionality. The future was imminently revolutionary and operated by a benevolent new intellectual class on systems like a new rumored Chilean technology called Cybersyn, which I am sure we sent agents to infiltrate and steal the blueprints of this amazing technology for ourselves to give us a national advantage ( link ), and groups of conceptual artists formed networks that connected revolutionary politics with the young people of establishment society, e.g. General Idea ( link ) All against a backdrop of those earth toned rainbows, the Olympics in Montreal, from
Example of NFB animation that aired on PBS
For me personally, I spent most of the 70's bored to death in school, but I got to come home and watch shows like "International Animation Festival" on Channel 13 (PBS if you grew up in the NYC area). They also had the first run of Monty Python's Flying Circus in the US, which was one of the few things me and my dad enjoyed together. But the bulk the animation shown on PBS came from the NFB - The National Film Board of Canada, which provided the retro aestheics that were later adopted by Boards of Canada. this video
