There's plenty of serious documentaries on the world's environmental problems. How to Boil a Frog takes a different approach, mixing fast-paced comedy with hard-hitting facts to help make complex subjects both understandable and more engaging. The accompanying study guide, done in the same style as the film, is an additional useful and unique resource.
This highly entertaining film features everyman dad narrator, Jon Cooksey (a screenwriter in real life), who is a guy worried about his daughter's future. Cooksey effectively plays a dozen different characters in the film to illustrate his points, from a lab-coated scientist to a surfer. He recounts his own wake-up moment, on the subject of climate change, and his subsequent discovery that global warming is part of a bigger problem: "global overshoot" -- humans putting too much demand on our limited natural world.
After presenting the consequences of overshoot, Jon launches into a clever review of five major problems and how they're connected: overpopulation, the war on nature, income inequality, peak oil and finally global warming. From there, he offers a set of positive solutions that can be accomplished by individuals and families to help turn things around. Along with the comedy, the movie interweaves high quality animation and world-class experts in relevant fields (presented both briefly and humorously) to help encourage both awareness and action.
ADVISORY: PG13 for some language and scenes.
This is the full international cut of the movie (53 minutes), available for free streaming on the condition that you go out and save civilization immediately after watching.