What on Earth! (film)
What on Earth! (French: La Terre est habitée!) is a 1966 National Film Board of Canada animated short co-directed by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal. The film is a mockumentary, introduced in its opening credits as produced by the "National Film Board of Mars" that takes a humorous look at car culture from the point of view of fictional Martians, who mistake automobiles for Earth's true inhabitants and people as their parasites. It attempts to examine the sociology of the automobile as the dominant species on earth, and makes wild guesses about the lifestyle, feeding habits, mating habits and funeral rites of this "species." Plot Presented as a documentary by the National Film Board of Mars, the film shows Earth from the view of an orbiting Martian spaceship. The spaceship did not land (Earth's oxygen atmosphere is toxic to Martians), but it did use cameras to capture footage of intelligent life on earth: the humble automobile. A subject is shown at his carefully-regulated dinner (a gas pump), before returning to shelter for the night (a garage). The next morning, he is seen traveling on a local highway before getting stuck in a traffic jam at the road's abrupt end. The