Dossier

Convinced that animation could have pedagogical virtues, he developed an illustrated scenario for a project entitled Le Tourisme dans Québec (Tourism in Quebec City), aimed at helping people understand the relevance of developing foreign tourism, "an industry destined to spread millions of dollars throughout the province". He also asked Brother Marie-Victorin of the Université de Montréal to animate scientific diagrams in educational films about botany and the natural sciences.

The Microbus 1^st project also had an educational aspect, but Barré took it in a completely different direction. Microbus is first and foremost a cartoon character, whom Barré describes as the "imperishable ruler of successive generations of microbes", and whose adventures are full of burlesque and satirical gags. To bring the film to fruition, Barré founded the Educational Art and Film Co. of Montréal, a kind of private school where students learned the rudiments of celluloid animation while working on a specific project. We don't know the identity of the students Barré hired. However, a document found in the archives bequeathed by Marie-Paul Barré seems to indicate a division of tasks among the students, whose surnames only appear.