THE BIRTH OF THE ROBOT (1936)
Animated short
Article 3271 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-3-2010
Posting Date: 7-28-2010
Directed by Len Lye
No voice cast
Country: UK
What it is: Surreal puppet-style animation

Venus uses her music to turn a man who died in the desert to a robot to run the world.

No plot description really seems to be adequate to describe this surreal industrial short made by Shell Oil. The basic upshot of the short is that in ancient days, the world was turned by hand, but in these modern times, we need a robot to turn the world, and that robot will need lubrication. In between we get same strange scenes of a man driving an anthropomorphic car over the pyramids. The man and the car get caught in a storm, have hallucinations, and die. Then a rain of oil turns the skeleton of the man into a robot. You’ll be scratching your head for most of it, but, if you’re like me, you’ll enjoy it all the same. I found this one on YouTube; hopefully, it will still be there when I finally publish this one.