Family Planning (1967) User Reviews

I'm No Fool With Birth Control

[boblipton · 5/10 · 21 April 2016]

This animated short was produced by Walt Disney for the Population Council, a think tank formed by the Rockefeller Foundation with John Foster Dulles. It does a lot of research on sexually transmitted diseases and, as you might expect, birth control -- here, referred to by the milder term of family planning.

This short is a lecture on the benefits of smaller families. True, Donald Duck appears on the screen, carrying various props to mishandle, for the audience's amusement with a familiar figure. However, that is merely to get the audience into seats to listen. It was the first time something like this would be used; clear similarities to World War Two shorts are evoked. However, the cautious, guarded language and the care taken to point out that there are a lot of different types of people and the couple used are there to stand in for everyone -- he seems to be a Bavarian farmer and she a Hindu woman; goodness knows how they got together -- make it clear that this was not a carefully thought out production.

A fine product to the topic it addresses for its time.

[Rodrigo_Amaro · 6/10 · 21 October 2022]

Disney and its educational values videos presents this animation on family planning and how important such thing is to people and mankind's progress. A clumsy Donald Duck working as a painter and a narrator present some fun facts on how the imbalance between families, communities, and the high progression of youth people versus the elderly contribute to generate a confused and chaotic world - but that was then and a little before since people kept having children without the means to raise them properly yet here we are with similar attitudes. But family planning was becoming a trend for obvious reasons and this movie helped a little bit (I think). Mostly, we as cultures and knowing the ways of the world also direct our attention to higher and brighter things than just growing population.

It's a harmless tiny picture about an important topic that usually weren't addressed much everywhere, neither schools deal with it. We know this very didatic and it had to be back in the day even though it was destine to adults but we understand how sensible people can be in dealing with certain topics; today we can present facts and telling like it is even showing how those babies actually came to life. But for a didatic project, it's all well-covered and well explained, with some insightful details about population growth and the obstacles faced by families when they expand to ways they can't control. It makes you think about the issue if it never crossed your mind before.

To those who see it as a conflicted issue or that Disney isn't actually addressing with seriousness and impact with the theme because it isn't all that easy to follow their guidance since we have to think about some variants around the globe, world culture and social implications such as health care (those who have and those who have not), I understand the criticism but don't find it valid since the makers were addressing the issue to the culture they knew (Americans after the baby boom generation). A film like this couldn't exactly predict forced planned parenthood like the China example in 1980 of one baby policy which prevented a whole generation of having the numbers of kids they wanted and high esteem for male child than female; or the opposite direction taken by Romania under Ceacescu's regime which encouraged families to have more babies as possible to fight for the Communist cause, but when his regime ended the number of abandoned children skyrocketed, paving a scenario of misery and poverty. And all the nations in between where education and health system are lacking and flawed and people don't have access to the information for making a family planning neither access to a film like this, for example. So, its importance cannot be diminished by all the things it doesn't mention or ignores, it must be accepted for what it is and what it represented back in the late 1960's. It's harmless and Donald Duck is always a charm. 6/10.