Many of the educational shorts we riff seem to have been designed not to teach children, but instead to confuse them into a state of dizzy, nauseous acceptance. Most try to hide this deception with an authoritative narrator, some pretense of structure, or official-sounding “key terms.” Our new offering, Join Hands, Let Go! makes no such attempt, and in fact is so bold as to put contradictory instructions right in the title! Do we join hands, or do we let go? Who are the children in this film? Where are they going, and why? Is the mustachioed man with the wacky outfits connected in any way? Is he a good man or a bad man? He seems like a bad man. Will I ever go to college, or even learn basic math, if we keep watching films like this in school? The answer Join Hands, Let Go! provides to all these questions is a firm, definitive, “whatever.”