Daily Archives: September 9, 2011

TGIF: “The Big Snit”

The Big Snit” may be the most famous animated short by the NFB’s Richard Condie. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 1985, one of the last NFB animated shorts to draw enough attention to be widely seen. It remains a favorite among animators.

In 1980’s “Across the River and Out of the Trees,” Frye considers the effects of mass media upon Canadian broadcasting culture. It is a remarkably optimistic outlook all told, even though the cost to Canadian institutions like the NFB has been high.

But there were difficulties that the coming of television made painfully obvious. These three new media, film, radio, and television, are mass media, and consequently follow the centrifugal and imperial rhythms of politics and economics more readily than the regionalizing rhythms of culture. This was not too crucial a problem for CBC radio, though it was certainly there, but the NFB had to struggle with problems of distribution created by the fact that movie houses had been monopolized by American syndicates. I remember a Spring Thaw skit which was a takeoff of an NFB film, ending with the line “on view in your local Sunday-School basement.” (CW 12, 561)