How to Boil a Frog

£61.30

The deadly threats to our planet, presented through parody and pastiche, in a fast-moving and hard-hitting documentary.

SKU: 2917
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Year Produced: 2011
Running time: 52 minutes
Trailer:  Watch on Youtube

Description

If you put a frog into boiling water it will kick and scream, but if you heat it slowly it will die before it notices… Are WE that frog? We have been WARNED. Jon sets out, through parody and pastiche, to create a deadly serious argument… laying out a set of personal solutions that will make your life better, and hopefully help civilisation too.

Eye-popping graphics ram home inconvenient truths: a moving earth complete with flickering flames meets and merges with a gold chain wearing oil drip, representing overshoot. This monstrous entity rampages around its cartoon home, growing the ever-grasping arms of over consumption. This deformed beast meets the war on nature and begins to wreak devastation. After all there is “nothing quite as destructive as a baby boomer with a visa card”.

As the tragicomedy progresses, past the disco dancing reindeer and through the plastic plankton choking off the world’s oceans, the film reveals statistic after statistic all pointing to inevitable destruction. When even Disney World can’t acquire all the water it needs the cry goes up “if Mickey isn’t safe, none of us are!” Squinting mercilessly from a mock-up of Coolidge’s “Poker Dogs” Jon asks why anyone should care if one fifth of the people on the planet live on less than $2 a day… and then proceeds to illustrate why third world problems just won’t stay put there anymore.

Dressed as the human incarnation of the devil, for indeed that is the role mankind appears to have cast itself in respect to the planet, he admits “these solutions are going to make global warming worse.” 
The films one utterly serious moment hits you like a freight train: when Jon recounts his father’s death from alcoholism. He never had the change of heart that could save him. But we can… Drive right on past Exxon and plump for chicken rather than beef; use birth control, “the most effective carbon offset you can buy.” Above all “find some way to change on the inside.”