The Hole (1962 film)

With The Hole, legendary animators John and Faith Hubley created an "observation," as the opening title credits state, a chilling Academy Award-winning meditation on the possibility of an accidental nuclear catastrophe. Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie and actor George Mathews improvised a lively dialogue that the Hubleys and their animators used as the voices of two New York construction workers laboring under Third Avenue.

Earlier in his career, while he worked as an animator in the Disney studios, John Hubley viewed a highly stylized Russian animated film — brought to his attention by Frank Lloyd Wright — that radically influenced his ideas about the possibilities of animation. With his new vision realized in this film, the Hubleys ominously, yet humorously, commented on the fears of nuclear devastation ever-present in cold war American culture during the year that the Cuban Missile crisis unfolded.

The Hole was added to the National Film Registry in 2013.