The Magic Stone

The lecturer shows a microcinematographic sequence of spirochaetes and drawings of the gonoccus (the bacteria responsible for syphilis and gonorrhea). He then turns to an easel and begins to draw 'the road of health'; the cartoon takes this up in magic drawing, in a style that is highly reminiscent of the 'Giro the Germ' series made for the Health and Cleanliness Council a few years before.

One of a group of seven documentaries made for the 1938 Empire Exhibition under the supervision of John Grierson, the film was part of a campaign to improve the fitness of the Scots.

Children's film shot in East Africa. Toto discovers that the elephants in the game park are being shot by ivory poachers.

“If abstract films are really abstract films… they deal exclusively with those abstract relations that can be expressed in terms of shape and motion” wrote Robert Fairthorne in Film Art in 1936. A mathematician and information scientist, Fairthorne saw aesthetic potential in an animation made as a teaching aid by Salt, and proposed this collaboration. (Tate.org.uk)

Two children on holiday go exploring, and after visiting Carisbrooke Castle are swept out to the Needles and are rescued by the lighthouse keepers.