Air!

Someone passed on this link to the National Film Board of Canada lately, and I've spent a good twenty minutes checking the site out. It doesn't have the "Cosmic Zoom" animation, which is one I've been after for the longest time (it's the one that goes from boy on a boat and zooms out to universal proportions, and then zooms back in, until you start seeing atoms), but it does offer 50 other short animation films which are excellent to watch if you're into that sort of thing.

One, in particular, had a good environmental angle. It's called "Air!" and has the following write-up:

"Although only a couple of minutes long, this animated short makes the point that oxygen is the stuff of life whether on land, in the air or water, but that it is becoming scarcer as man-made pollutants crowd it out. This is a film without words in which plants, birds, fish and, finally, man come to the same "breathless" end."

Anyway, it's very effective - a nice marriage of visual prowess at play to get across an important message.

© National Film Board of Canada. Reproduced with permission of the NFB from www.nfb.ca