If you've got twenty-eight minutes to spare today, spend them watching this video. It's called Great and it snagged the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards in 1976. It's actually sorta animated — a combination of various media used to tell the story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a 19th century British civil engineer and architect. That may not sound like an interesting subject but I saw this film at an animation festival shortly after it came out and spent years trying to find a place to see it again.
It's a British film directed by Bob Godfrey, a very clever filmmaker who is often credited as inspiring Terry Gilliam's animation for Monty Python. If you watch this film, you'll see why people say that…