Automania 2000 (1964)

Best movie of this year hands down!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This short by John Halas and Joy Batchelor was nominated for an Academy Award for Animated Short. There will be spoilers ahead: The basic premise of this is that automobiles, having built up in numbers, size and purpose to an absurd degree, have ground to a halt through perpetual gridlock. Everyone now lives in stationary cars stacked in layers.Naturally, people being people, there's still a striving by many to better their neighbors, which calls for MORE cars, which still don't go anywhere but up. Disaster is inevitable.While cars are the ostensible target here, science and human nature are really what's being skewered here. The animation is rather dated and limited, but the short is more than worth watching.This short can be found on a DVD with five other Halas and Batchelor shorts which is included in a book about the animators, titled Halas and Batchelor Cartoons, An Animated History, by their daughter Vivien Halas and Paul Wells. Halas and Batchelor are significant to animation in general and to animation in the UK. The book itself is very good and the shorts on the DVD are well done and all are worth watching. Automania 2000 is recommended.

I am mainly familiar with the animation work of British husband-and-wife team John Halas and Joy Batchelor via their wonderful cartoon adaptation of George Orwell's political allegory ANIMAL FARM (1955); though this one-reeler got a favourable assessment in "Leslie Halliwell's Film Guide" and was nominated for an Oscar, I never had the opportunity to catch it until I decided to check its availability via "You Tube" on a whim! I still did not expect it to be this surreal, or so thoroughly effective – to say nothing of prophetic – as a satire on society's obsession with automobiles, something which I thankfully am not bothered with myself...as I do not even own a car, despite having acquired a driving licence years ago (and which is why I can never understand some people's adulation for anything equipped with an engine)! Anyway, Science is content here to supply to the public demand for larger (the one point it did not get right, since things are actually becoming increasingly microscopic in size) and ever more sophisticated models (eventually being also able to reproduce themselves!). The result of this sees the whole planet engulfed by motor vehicles, so much so that their owners (and immediate families) are forced to take up residence inside them! The visualization of a massive pile-up of machines and helicopters flying above to provide the necessary sustenance and medical attention to the trapped occupants is delightful...but the solitary manufacturer himself, previously safe up in his proverbial ivory tower, is ultimately overwhelmed by his own creations. The stylish film is colourful and great fun – and, at this stage, makes me wonder what other gems of its ilk (or, for that matter, Short Subjects in general) may have been eluding me all this time...

Sometimes its interesting to see how people back a generation or two fantasized how crazy the world might get by the year 2000. Hey, I'm old enough myself to remember that the year "2000" sounded so far in the future that you couldn't imagine it. How time flies.What's even goofier are the loons who would look at this cartoon in 2008 and think, "Wow, man, that is, like, such a profound statement on materialism and such." Puh-leeze. This cartoon, although fun to watch, was absurd when it was made and is even more so today. In today's world, we are building smaller and more efficient cars and other objects. You'll always have greed and materialistic people; that's just part of our sinful makeup. I do appreciate this animated writers for pointing that out, though, and I hope they keep poking fun at those who would accumulate more and more and more. Kudos to the several writers of this "cartoon" for the satire. By the way, the writers tell us quickly that the "soon, the whole world" is accumulating these gigantic cars. If you read the plot summary, it inaccurately and biasedly blames America for this. Obviously, it's some flaming Liberal with this typical prejudice. That's not what is said in this animated short.This satire on scientists and progress gives us an absurd fantasy about how cars dominate people's lives by 2000. One has to remember how big cars became in the late '50s and then the '60s, with the huge tail fins, etc.That's one of the premises here in this exaggerated goofy look into the future. In what starts out as just one family with one huge car, escalates into 40-foot cars, automobiles then overcrowding the streets to the point they ARE the street, piled one on top of the other to the point where people live in their cars. Helicopters have to then administer food, drink, medical supplies, etc., to all those car-dwellers down below. Hey, I told you it was silly....but it's fun, and it does have a point to be made.I liked the artwork in here; very '60s-ish. This cartoon was done by the British husband-and-wife team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor. Goofy as it was with the story, it was still fun to watch.

Automania 2000 is a British animated short from Halas and Batchelor that depicts a future that is overrun by cars as the result of public demand for bigger and better ones. The effect is that cars stack up so much space in the world that people start living in them without going outside much. And then cars start reproducing themselves which cause even more girdlock. Partly humorous in tone owing to the cheery narration but pretty eerie visually, Automania 2000 is a compelling look at the not-too-distant time beyond the present that should give us lots to think about. Well worth seeing for animation fans. I discovered this unique short on YouTube through Cartoon Brew.