Encouraged by artistic parents, Evelyn Lambart engaged in painting, drawing and photography from her earliest childhood and, after high school, went on to study commercial art at the Ontario College of Art.
After graduation, Lambart worked for a year and a half doing illuminations for Canada's Book of Remembrance, very delicate work that required a fine hand and a good sense of colour. This gave her the confidence she needed to apply to the National Film Board, which took her on as a letterer in 1942.

At that time, the only ones doing animation at the NFB were Norman McLaren and Guy Glover. One day, McLaren asked Lambart to help with some heraldic devices for a film he was working on and, with her experience in illuminating, she was able to do a very good job. This began a long-lasting and very productive partnership, with Lambart often perfecting the tools McLaren needed and suggesting materials to produce the varied textures in his films.

Since McLaren was very busy starting up the animation department, Lambart spent the next few couple of years creating maps and diagrams for the World in Action series. When that ended, she began her first solo work, The Impossible Map (1947), a short film on map projections in which she ingeniously used grapefruit to show the difficulties of depicting the world as flat. In 1949, she made two sequences for Challenge: Science Against Cancer.
Her collaboration with McLaren resumed in earnest in 1949 with Begone Dull Care/Caprice en couleurs, a highly inventive film in which the pair even took advantage of their discovery that the dust they kicked up created very interesting patterns on the film. According to Lambart, "Norman was a moving spirit in the invention of animation techniques. There was always something brewing in his mind. Always something that he was going to need help with and I was always so interested and keen about what we were doing and what we would do next." It was a partnership based on mutual respect; in fact, Lambart is credited as co-director on six of the eight films she made with him.

In all the years they worked together, Lambart made only one film without McLaren, a stereoscopic short entitled O Canada, which she animated and directed in 1952. In the early 1960s, however, McLaren became interested in ballet films, which held no interest for her, so Lambart struck out on her own. She perfected the technique of paper cutouts transferred to lithograph plate which she would then paint and animate. She used this technique in seven finely crafted, award-winning films: Fine Feathers (1968), The Hoarder (1969), Paradise Lost (1970), The Story of Christmas (1973), Mr. Frog Went A-Courting (1974), The Lion and the Mouse (1976) and The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse/Le Rat de maison et le Rat des champs (1980).
You can find more details on the films directed by Evelyn Lambart in the Film Collection.

Bibliography

The January 1988 issue of ASIFA-Canada's magazine (Vol. 15, No. 3) is devoted to Lambart.