Automania 2000 (1964)

You won't be disappointed!

Just perfect...

best movie i've ever seen.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

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.

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.

The year 2000; in the past year science has made massive leaps – giving us seemingly unlimited power, the ability to harvest the sea and the ability to make inexhaustible food for all. The same principles have been applied to manufacturing which has sadly overwhelmed the streets with cars. In some areas, families now live in their cars and have been stationary for almost five years now. The film looks back at the development and marketing of the "need" for bigger and better cars that ultimately led them us to this sorry state.Although the year 2000 is now the past rather than the future as seen from the early sixties this film still makes a valid point and indeed its warning about the roads of materialism and greed us more applicable today than it was then. The film uses an American voice, speaking in glowing "marketing" speak of the progress made, putting a positive spin on everything; this was perhaps an easy ploy but it works and only helps to highlight the danger of chasing the constant dream of material wealth. This is important as they film takes its point to extremes but by use of the narration, the relevance is still obvious and it still made me think. The animation is basic and dated (like a clunky Jetsons?) but it works, with the innocence of the style only adding to the sensation of science marching onwards with a blissful and cheerful lack of foresight.Overall an interesting little animation that you may find doing the rounds at liberal film festivals as part of a throwback look at commercialism and materialism.