AustLit

A short animated film from surrealist Dusan Marek. The plot is described by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) as follows: 'While a man is fishing, two men go over the wall landing in a boat below. The fisherman follows the other two down, but lands in the boat head first causing a leak. They all sink. The end.'

Though the NFSA does not make it explicit that this film is based on a nursery rhyme (as it does for Marek's other nursery-rhyme films), the title and the NFSA's description of the plot strongly suggest that the film is based on the English nursery rhyme commonly called either 'The Three Wise Men of Gotham' or 'The Three Sailors of Gotham', which plays on the reputed foolishness of the inhabitants of the village of Gotham, in Nottinghamshire:

Three wise men of Gotham,
They went to sea in a bowl,
And if the bowl had been stronger
My song had been longer.