What’s the point of life? Kindness? Recycling? Leaving your body to science? This hybrid of animation and live-action from 2009 generates good fun and plenty of food for thought from its simple premise: asking children some of the most enduring questions in philosophy. While many of the answers – including an innovative ‘exploding monkey theory’ of Homo sapiens origins – are simply great material for the accompanying animations, others brush up against the current limits of human understanding, prompting meaningful reflection on how we think about life. With its abundance of laugh-out-loud and heartfelt moments, the Montreal-based director Karina Garcia Casanova’s playful film is a worthy tribute to the deeply creative thinking of kids.
Director: Karina Garcia Casanova
Illustrator: James Braithwaite
Animator: Darren Pasemko
Producers: John Christou, Karina Garcia Casanova
videoNature and landscape
Scenes from Aboriginal Australian pottery chart the turn of the seasons
7 minutes
videoEthics
What’s an idea worth? How prominent thinkers have understood intellectual property
6 minutes
videoThinkers and theories
The prison abolitionist who dares to envision a world without ‘unfreedoms’
16 minutes
videoKnowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes
videoEconomics
A tour of New York’s gaudiest neighbourhood with the Marxist geographer David Harvey
13 minutes
videoChildhood and adolescence
‘Do worms cry?’ – and other questions collected from the mind of a curious child
4 minutes
videoPhilosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
videoWar and peace
Two Ukrainian boys’ summer unfolds just miles from the frontlines
22 minutes
videoTechnology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes