Norman McLaren

A slow-motion study by Norman McLaren of the pas-de-deux adagio, one of the most exacting and difficult dances of classical ballet. A ballet originally choreographed by the Russian ballet master Asaf Messerer is performed for this film by the internationally known Canadian pair, David and Anna Marie Holmes, to the music of Albinoni’s Adagio. A film to heighten the aesthetic appreciation of classical ballet and to afford observation of the technique and mechanics of the adagio movements.

Pinscreen animation makes use of a screen filled with movable pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows.

A man sets a ping-pong ball into motion and it becomes fruitful and multiplies.

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." A 7 day vlog during the summer of 2023, a story of dreamers and drowners.

This documentary is a portrait of the animator of Le Paysagiste, from his childhood in Eastern Quebec to his career at the NFB. Trained at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Drouin became in some ways the heir to Alexandre Alexeïeff when he began working with the Alexeïeff-Parker pinhole screen in 1974. Recounting his relationship with the filmmaker and inventor, coming back with lucidity and precision on the whole of his own filmography, Jacques Drouin delivers here a precious testimony on creation. Enriched with numerous excerpts and unpublished images from the filmmaker's personal archives, Jacques Drouin en relief is both the adventure of a lifetime and a valuable lesson in cinema.

To the tune of a classic French-Canadian nonsense song, surreal blackbird made of lines loses body parts and gets them back threefold.

Norman McLaren attempts to give the opening speech for the first Montreal International Film Festival, but his microphone won't cooperate.

A playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the retina of the eye, McLaren engraves pictures on blank film creating vivid, percussive effects.

The film's soundtrack is an original musical composition produced with synthetic sound - through photographing unusual geometric shapes and running them through an optical sound head. The images are an artistic rendering of this soundtrack.

This joyful short animation features a dancing hen that transforms into an egg. The film was made without a camera by Norman McLaren, who drew directly onto 35 mm movie stock with ordinary pen and ink. Colour was added optically.

An animated short film about The Four Seasons by Norman McLaren.

Two ballet dancers perform a dance enhanced with surreal after-image visuals.

An animated film drawn entirely in pastels. Various fantastical plant-like things "grow" from the ground, eventually launching five spheres. The spheres drift in space while changing shapes and come back down to another setting, which eventually becomes more fantastical and symbolic than the opening one. The soundtrack has a jazz slant, with an ensemble of four saxophones and synthetic sound (i.e. sound created by drawing directly on the soundtrack).

The Korean alphabet, illustrated with animation, spoken, and accompanied by music.

This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.

Perhaps the only film whose content is totally based on the musical form known as canon. The first sequence is a simple demonstration of the canon "Frere Jacques" where four cubes dance and combine with one another on a checkerboard. The second sequence show four little human-like figures dancing in space. The third and most elaborate sequence shows a human going through several strange gesticulations. Through multiple printing we realize that the man, as in the previous sequences, is part of a visual canon and is making the gestures to himself. As we hear variations on the canonic theme so too do we witness visual variations: a woman and cat enters the canon. To show the musical technique of inversion, the image of the man is printed upside down.

An attempt to animate an abstract Charlie Chaplin-esque figure.

In this Oscar-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower.

This animated short co-animated by René Jodoin and Norman McLaren was produced for inclusion in the Let's All Sing Together sing-along series. It illustrates the popular song Alouette, gentille alouette. The technique used is single-frame animation of paper cutouts.

Alexandre Alexeïeff illustrated the song "Et moi je m'enfouiyais" (En passant) using the pinscreen technique. Norman McLaren illustrated "C'est l'aviron" using drawings on a fixed background, with the characters pasted in as they were drawn.

An animation film, made without the use of a camera, in which "boogie" played by Albert Ammons and "doodle" drawn by Norman McLaren combine to make a rhythmic, brightly colored film experiment. The main title is in eight languages.

It's midnight in a graveyard. The principal characters are spooks, ghosts, bats, bells, and, at the end, the sun. As midnight strikes, 12 spooks appear, then two ghosts. They move to the music's rhythm. Against the black night, they are blue and yellow. Bats appear as does a xylophone of bones. Mist rises, spooks swirl. A bell tolls. The sky turns light blue, the ghosts' dance slows. Then black night returns bringing intimations of frenzy. Bones play snare drums; spooks peek out of square graves. Scary faces appear. Frenetic movement takes over. A rooster crows and all return to earth as the sun's light appears.

In this early film Norman McLaren shot crystal formations through a low-power microscope, using polarized light with the lower part of the picture masked off. The film was then rewound and a scene of dancers was filmed.

Images supered on a revolving barrel.