One of the world's greatest creators in animation
(April 11, 1914, Stirling, United Kingdom - January 26, 1987, Montreal, Canada)

Norman McLaren's work Neighbours/Voisins has been added to the Memory of the World Register of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In 1975, the editor of the Quebec magazine Séquences wrote that the best way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the magazine was to devote a special issue to the work of Norman McLaren, whom he described as the "poet of animation".

It's true that as an animator and filmmaker, Norman McLaren was a poet, for whom images, color, sounds and music had special resonances which he was capable of exploring in their entire range and magnitude. Today, more than fifty films remain as evidence of his gifts.

Biographical milestones

The young Norman McLaren intended to specialize in set design when he entered the Glasgow School of Fine Arts in 1932. He joined the Glasgow Film Society and discovered motion pictures through the masterpieces of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Fischinger. He quickly realized the relevance of this "seventh art" as a means of expression, and began painting directly on film, scratching the emulsion to make the film stock transparent, unaware that Len Lye was also carrying out similar experiments.

McLaren began his filmmaking career in 1934, and the following year, two of his films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where John Grierson was one of the members of the jury. Impressed with the young filmmaker's talent, Grierson offered him a job at the General Post Office Film Unit in London.
In 1936 McLaren worked as a cameraman in Spain during the Civil War, an experience that haunted him for many years. When he felt that war in Europe was imminent, he decided to emigrate to the United States, and settled in New York in 1939.

In 1941, at the invitation of John Grierson, who had become Canada's first Government Film Commissioner, McLaren joined the National Film Board.

The first films he made for the NFB were almost all intended to support the war effort: V for Victory (1941), Five for Four (1942), Dollar Dance (1943) and Keep Your Mouth Shut (1944). This didn't prevent him from making several experimental films and founding an animation department at the NFB.

McLaren's determination to explore new techniques resulted in a body of work that won him international renown. Over his career, he made 59 films, most leaning towards experimental animation, with music as an important element. In three of his films, he also experimented with the use of dance and dancers. McLaren's colleagues in Technical Services and Engineering invented a special camera and projector system to enable him to continue his experimentation. In 1951, thanks to their innovations, McLaren made two 3-D films, Around Is Around and Now Is The Time.

McLaren's sense of movement led him to apply animation to anything and everything. He used a simple chair in A Chairy Tale (1957); scratches and paint on the film itself (Begone Dull Care/Caprice en couleurs) in 1949, Blinkity Blank in 1954); figurative art, as in the Chants populaires series from 1945 to 1958; and a mixture of live characters, animation, and special effects, like Neighbours in 1952 and Canon in 1964. In Opening Speech: McLaren/Discours de bienvenue de Norman McLaren (1960), he even filmed himself struggling with a microphone that had a will of its own.

Besides experimenting with images, McLaren was interested in creating sound by painting and engraving on film. And in addition to his forays into the realm of 3-D, he investigated the possibilities offered by complex optical printing processes.
Among Norman McLaren's closest collaborators were Evelyn Lambart, who coproduced six of his films and worked on two others, and the musician and composer Maurice Blackburn, an innovator of the same stature as McLaren, but in the field of music. McLaren even hauled Blackburn out of retirement to work on his last film, Narcissus/Narcisse, in 1983.

Together, Norman McLaren and Grant Munro made and produced a series of five color films which constitute an introduction to the basic techniques of film animation. Animated Motion Parts 1 to 5 is certainly of interest to anyone wishing to make animated films.

While creativity, humor and technical feats are the hallmark of McLaren's work, as a man he was well known for his fellow-feeling toward the entire human race. In 1949, he went to China to take part in an audiovisual education project sponsored by UNESCO, in which he introduced students to simplified animation techniques and provided them with the needed training. In 1953, he participated in a similar project in India.

Norman McLaren's films have garnered more than 200 international awards. Neighbours won an Oscar® in 1952, and Blinkity Blank received the Palme d'or for short films at the 1955 Cannes festival. If we consider, in addition to these awards and his body of work, the honorary doctorates awarded to him all over the world, his membership in juries at countless festivals and a variety of events, the many tributes paid to him, the retrospectives of his films, the articles, papers and theses on his work, the exhibitions of his drawings and films, we can better understand the fact that, years after his death, his reputation is as strong as it ever was.

In 2009, Norman McLaren's works were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Registry, which identifies and lists the most significant documentary heritage collections in the world.

The Norman McLaren Heritage Prize, created and awarded by ASIFA-Canada and Guy Glover on behalf of Norman McLaren's estate, is given every year to an artist whose work helps to perpetuate McLaren's ideas or follows his innovative path.

It is no exaggeration to say that McLaren was and is a master and a source of inspiration for countless filmmakers, and that thousands of people throughout the world consider his name and the NFB's to be practically synonymous.

In 1989, two years after the noted filmmaker's death, the building housing the head office of the NFB was renamed the Norman McLaren Building.

Among the works that can be consulted on Norman McLaren are The Eye Hears, the Ear Sees, produced in 1970 by the BBC in collaboration with the NFB; Holland Animation, produced by the NFB in 1983; and the film Donald McWilliams devoted to him in 1990, Creative Process: Norman McLaren, which includes interviews and clips from his experimental unfinished and unreleased works as well as excerpts from his prize-winning films.

A large number of articles have been written on Norman McLaren. Among the most interesting documents on the great filmmaker are the special issue Séquences devoted to him to mark its 20th anniversary, and the tribute it published in April 1987, shortly after his death. He is the subject of an ever-growing body of papers and theses by students of film, and the NFB has published their own McLaren.

» Consult a detailed biofilmography by Donald McWilliams and Marcel Jean HERE

 » Watch films by Norman McLaren at NFB.ca

 » Discover the masters of animation at NFB's website FOCUS ON ANIMATION HERE