Remembered/Imagined Film ID???

[sufi]

I have this memory - it may be false, but it's of an animation i saw as a kid;

some things i reckon i know about it are like details i don't guess i could have made up or dreamt?
the film was french, and short - like less than 5 minutes, i guess maybe i saw it early 70s. i think more than once

iirc, the film starts off as a shot of a child rowing a boat on a river in a city, the camera then zooms out and the view widens and widens , you see the city, the country the planet? i can't remember how far it widened... but then the motion reverses and it zooms back in vertiginously back to the child, closer & closer towards the child's arm, the hairs, a microscopic bug on the arm, cells, molecules.... and that's it.
kinda the world in a grain of sand...

the style is quite realistic - not cartoon, it reminds me of nothing as much as the swedish painter carl larsson, altho his images were about alot when i was a kid so... i don't know whether perhaps that was my only available comparator?

why i ask? well obv i'd like to know whether that was a true memory, but also to date that impression, and of course to re-watch the film, i don't particularly know why it left such a strong impression?

 

[swears]

Well, if you don't have any luck here, the Onion's AV Club runs a feature where people email in to ask for identification of half remembered TV shows and movies:

http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/ask_the_a_v_club_may_25_2007

 

[labrat]

rings a distant bell - sure i saw it on Blue Peter as a kid....

 

[noel emits]

Rings a bell here too. Maybe there's more than one film of this kind.

I did a quick search and ended up with this by mistake, which was nice.

 

[swears]

half remembered scene...

I remember seeing this scene in a comedy film or perhaps a TV show a few years back. Definitely made in the sixties. A bunch of hipsters/hippy-types are hanging around and one of them is meant to be some sort of trendy artist who wears a can of soup around his neck, obviously a piss take of Warhol. I don't know why this bugs me, it's just something on the tip of my tongue that I can't quite recall.

 

[h-crimm]

excuse to post photos

sounds like powers of ten, a nine minute film made in chicago in 1977.
But this isnt what you meant is it?

but i wonder if there isnt a french version

and the americans just stole the idea four or five years later

replacing the animation with photograph at the human scales

the shot of the arm over the edge of the rowing boat with maybe rdrips from the oar going into the water
definitely rings a bell.

And does the affected way the guy on the rug is holding his hand suggest a nod to the limp way way the child (female?) was drooping her hand on the boat edge in my memory?