This 1956 British Technicolor animated film directed by Philip Stapp and produced by Halas & Batchelor for the World Health Organization uses cartoons rendered in a mid century modern style to address the issue of alcoholism through metaphor, caricature, and abstraction (TRT: 10:17).
Distributor title card: “This film has been provided as an educational service by the Michigan State Board of Alcoholism” Opening titles. “The World Health Organization Presents, To Your Health, Color by Technicolor, a film by Philip Stapp.” Credits continue: “Supervised by Professor E.M. Jellinek, Music by Matyas Seiber, Animation by Brian Borthwick and John Smith, a Halas and Batchelor Cartoon” (0:09). Animation begins: A starscape traces an outline of an international everyman, toasting a drink. A constellation of bottled drinks follows. “John” becomes tipsy and clumsy at a part, then floats out the door, soaring into a pink sky (0:48). John falls back down to earth, hungover. A stereotypical lady prohibitionist speaks out, followed by an advertising pitch man, a snooty academic, and a bespectacled intellectual. John wishes he could have unbiased facts. A doctor approaches him (1:45). A trio of doctors in a laboratory examine beakers of colored liquid with microscopes. Illustrations of grain, grapes, resulting beverages with ratios of ethyl alcohol indicated in yellow (2:24). Yellow lines trail into an illustration of a stomach, spreading out across a cutaway drawing of a man’s body. Cells are enveloped in alcohol. The liver transforms the substance through oxidation (2:58). Drunkenness is explained via an animated illustration of the brain, represented with humanoid figures in a “control center.” Reasoning, inhibition, memory, vision, hearing, and coordination are represented. An “early man” working a bellows succumbs, representing heart stoppage (3:42). John, drunk, gets behind the wheel of a car and puts a key in the ignition. Brakes squeal offscreen. John in a jail cell (5:06). Cartoons of social drinkers. A man in glasses faces tensions: A wife, a boss, a busy urban crosswalk, newsboys with newspapers foretelling “doom” (5:27). A shadow passes over a man’s face. Tensions are represented. A series of occasions for drinking escalate to drinking alone in an alley (5:53). Drinks pour before unblinking eyes. A domestic dispute. The man hangs his head and carries suitcases to a new, squalid environment (6:55). A haggard face. Abstract shapes form above it (7:40). The man awakens in a hospital bed, holding an outline of a bottle. Doctors and nurses appear. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is invoked in narration (8:01). Cavemen transform into ancients, conquistadors, colonists, a modern wedding (8:43). Superstitions and prejudices against non-drinkers are represented. Previous scenes in review (9:13). John takes a drink, then finds himself trapped in a large glass. He shatters it with a smile (9:42).
Halas and Batchelor was a British animation company founded in 1940 by husband and wife John Halas and Joy Batchelor which initially created wartime information and propaganda films. Their London and Cainscross studios produced dozens of educational shorts, as well as the 1954 feature adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” the 1964 Oscar-nominated satire “Automania 2000,” and the 1979 promotional film for the band Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” This artful P.S.A., notable for John Halas and Brian Bortwick’s succinct, colorful, “cartoon modern” treatment of alcoholism, remained in circulation for decades after it was produced.
According to the CDC, excessive alcohol use is responsible for more than 95,000 deaths in the United States each year. Alcoholism is a leading cause of preventable death in the United States.
