The Impossible Map

Still from 'The Impossible Map' Hidden amongst the 50 animated short films put online by Canada’s National Film Board (via Boing Boing) is a 10-minute educational film about cartographic projections from 1947: The Impossible Map. Directed by Evelyn Lambart, the film uses grapefruit peels and turnip skins to make the point that a flat map of a round globe is necessarily imperfect — a point made with more piquancy nowadays, but more matter of fact then: “Every time we get a correct drawing for one part [of the world],” the narrator (Bill Bolt) intones, ” the other parts are out of shape.”

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