Andrea, a fellow graduate student, passed this 1990 short animation along (it won an Oscar for the best animated short in 1990). It might be useful to show in class to lead to discussions of cause and effect.
Of course, we have “simple” cause and effect at the beginning, related to physics. But then, a whole political can of worms opens up toward the end.
(Heck, we could even ask metaphysical cause and effect questions: why are they there? what put them there? how did they get there? Perhaps silly questions in relation to this movie, but they remind me of one of my favorite movies, The Cube, for which the answers are economical/political/administrative.)
