Let’s Pollute: Oscar Nominee with a Conscience

This week I was able to see some of the Oscar-nominated short animation films prior to the award ceremony tomorrow night. The entry from the United States was “Let’s Pollute,” the brainchild of Geefwee Boedoe, a former employee of Pixar. He wrote, directed, and animated the film on a $15,000 budget, editing the final version in a friend’s garage.

Boedoe also wrote jingles for the film and convinced his wife to do recordings of them.  It took him three years to finish the six-minute short. After being rejected as an entrant in 10 film festivals, “Let’s Pollute” won an Oscar nomination last month.

The film is about the economic and social devastation of pollution in our society, but it’s presented in the artificial, upbeat style of 1950s and 60s educational films for children. “Pollution is our heritage and keeps our economy going strong,” the peppy narrator explains in the opening.

The introduction shows the history of pollution; how we initially tried hard without success to pollute the North American continent. It wasn’t always as “fun and easy” as it is now, the narrator tells us. Then we realized that “man needed a partner, an ally: he needed the machine.” It was this “wonder of waste” that helped us to get serious about pollution at last.

The second part of the film is the instructional part: it explains the simple rules of “how to be better polluters for a better blighted tomorrow.”

“Buy twice as much as you need,” the film advises, showing an American family at a huge discount store. One clip shows how to buy products with optimum packaging, as a man opens a case of chips, takes out box of chips, then a “fun-size” package from the box, and finally a tiny bag containing a single tortilla chip.

The film also instructs viewers to “throw twice as much away”—showing the family on a picnic, disposing of their plates, utensils, tablecloth, napkins, and picnic table. Then they roll up some Astro-turf and two fake trees and throw them away as well.

Moving twice as far away from your job is another piece of advice, showing how you can become a better polluter by having to drive longer to work every day. And you might even total your car in the process, creating even more landfill!

Leaving all the lights on in your house at the same time…shunning recycling…throwing away things instead of fixing them…are all great steps toward maximum pollution. But the really important thing, the film instructs, is to stop caring. “Remember,” the narrator says seriously, “you can always care less.”

The film also offers some wickedly funny glimpses of capitalists. It depicts environmental regulations as a menacing dragon destroying the progress of pollution, as it takes smokestacks in a chokehold. The film then explains why it is much better not to have any regulations at all, assuring us that we can trust the capitalists to always do what’s best for us. As the narrator says this, a group of consumers march like lemmings toward a giant set of crushing cogs. A capitalist stands on a platform in safety, urging them forward, with a chart behind him totaling up more and more profits.

You can read more about “Let’s Pollute” on the film’s official site and see screen shots on Facebook.