Dermot O'Connor spends the film's opening minutes on oil formation and peak oil before building to what he calls its most important sequence, a section on economic growth that argues no system can expand forever on a planet with finite resources. The animation borrows its look from 1940s pro-capitalist cartoons, cheerful line-drawn figures and bright colors delivering an argument those original cartoons would never have made, and the mismatch between style and message is the film's main device. After growth, the film turns to food supply and the energy inputs propping up industrial agriculture, then closes with a chapter O'Connor titles, without much irony, "The Happy Ending." He narrates the whole thing himself, walking through charts and diagrams on oil production curves and energy return on investment. Made over seven years and finished in 2011, the film predates the shale fracking boom, a gap O'Connor addresses directly rather than pretending the numbers still hold, while insisting the underlying math about finite resources has not changed.