Please Think of the Narwhals (2024)

At the beginning I thought this was just going to be one of those Greta Thunberg style pontifications saying green is good and everyone else is evil, but by layering this story from ridiculous to more ridiculous, it actually suggests a fair degree of commons sense at the end. It’s the young “Harry” (Louis Morris) who has been adopted by mums “Edith” (Aaliyah Warner) and “Marble” (Frankie Williams) and who is sick fed up of their refusal to recycle. Mum No. 1. is way to busy running her ball point pen and Exocet missiles businesses whilst No. 2 is just a yoga teaching natural litter lout. He tries to engage his friends, but it’s only when he warns of the existential danger to narwhals that he recruits “Gwen” (Summer Mainwaring) and they embark of a plan to cure his folks of their recalcitrant behaviour. What chance, though, when their early results merely ensure that picking up rubbish is criminalised? What ever would have happened to the Wombles? By exaggerating the scenario and by using a really quite engaging young lad to deliver the message, director Richard Price manages to poke fun at excess and zeal, irresponsibility and indifference with his tongue in his cheek and he also manages to quite amiably illustrate just how fickle politicians are to pressure groups and policies of whim. It’s quite a funny short film, with it’s moral clear enough and is well worth ten minutes.