From undersung Australian animator Paul Williams comes his debut feature, the eccentric yet grim environmental fable The Island of Nevawuz, a 48-minute special that above all things eerily predicted the rise of Donald Trump. A medieval community residing on a plentiful island, unaware of the changing climate elsewhere in the world, finds themselves at the mercy of modern industrialist colonisation, under the tyrannical rule of the lying Count Cedric, cigar-chomping tycoon J.B. Trumphorn and his plans to reform this village into another city complex and flood the market with his - wait for it - Trump line of estates and automobiles. There is less subtlety to be found here than the Loraxes of the world, barely sugarcoating the lying, the wars, the destruction and the lack of consideration towards public income or interest that builds empires like Trumphorn's, yet coming to a hopeful conclusion that still reckons with the irreversible repercussions of urbanisation. It's a charming, if quietly terrifying piece of work, and for too long has remained in total obscurity until today.

Williams would later direct three feature films around 75 minutes in length, all of which are absurd in their own special ways, expand on his social awareness and quite prominently reuse animations of their main characters shovelling coal. His most ambitious and off-kilter film of them all, The Black Planet, subverts the Bond dynamic by putting together a so-called energy conservationist and a second-wave feminist - without romantically involving them, in quite a progressive move for the time - when an American senator and a military officer decide to use them as pawns in their plot to nuke Russia and win the race to claim a newly discovered planet that will grant them their solution to the oil crisis; a funny counterpoint to the anti-oil-mining rhetoric explored in Nevawuz. The Phantom Treehouse, a cross between Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland with a bunyip added in, took a safer approach for younger audiences yet still didn't shy away from absurdism or satire, while The Steam-Driven Adventures of Riverboat Bill tackled a system devoted to systematic erasure of species and how there is no logic to such conservative laws whatsoever. His last known credits were as writer and animation director on TV shows The Silver Brumby and The New Adventures of Ocean Girl, and until last year the easiest ways to track down his films were festival showings in Australia. His short film That's Progress may remain a rarity, but at least now all four of these kooky curios can be easily accessed and cherished on YouTube.

Archived: https://archive.org/details/the-islan...
The Black Planet:    • The Black Planet (1982) Full Movie  
The Phantom Treehouse (COPPA'd):    • The Phantom Treehouse - 1984  
The Steam-Driven Adventures of Riverboat Bill:    • The Steam-Driven Adventures of Riverb...