Hunger

Hunger (1974)

La Faim

In this Oscar-nominated animated short film, director Peter Foldès depicts one man’s descent into greed and gluttony. Rapidly dissolving and ever-evolving images create a contrast between abundance and want. One of the first films to use computer animation, this satire serves as a cautionary tale against self-indulgence in a world still plagued by hunger and poverty.

Date of release
1974-10-01
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (38)
Runtime
12m
Genres
Animation
Director
Peter Foldès

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 2. Including: BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film

Hunger/La Faim is a 1974 Canadian animated short film produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It was directed by Peter Foldes and is one of the first computer animation films. The story, told without words, is based on the consequences of gluttony and greed in contemporary society, which showcases a man's progression from slim and young to grotesque and obese.

Background and production

Peter Foldes worked in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada's Division of Radio and Electrical Engineering's Data Systems Group, who decided to develop a computer animation application in 1969. NRC scientist Nestor Burtnyk had heard an animator from Disney explain the traditional animation process, where a head animator draws the key cels and assistants draw the fill in pictures.

The National Film Board in Montreal was contacted so that artists could experiment with computer animation. Foldes, who was living in Paris at the time, was contacted first. He gave an "unusual script proposal" based on the use of metamorphosis to René Jodoin, the head of NFB's French animation division at the time.

Foldes' first film using Burtnyk's program was a 1971 computer key frame animated short experimental film involving freehand drawings called Metadata. Following the significant attention and reviews of the short film that summer, Jodoin decided that the next step would be to make a "normal" short film.

Hunger took Foldes and his NRC partners a year and a half to complete. Foldes, Burtnyk, and Wein used a 2D technique that allowed object shape modification and line interpolation techniques. Stylistically, the short film's line drawings dissolve and reshape to form various images. The budget for Hunger costed $38,893 (equivalent to $270,603 in 2025) to produce. Featuring no dialogue, the music for the short film was composed by Pierre F. Brault.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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