Welcome! We’re back with another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one’s about clashing philosophies.

Chances are you’ve heard the words before. Norman McLaren wrote them in the mid-century, and they spread around the world during the ‘50s and ‘60s. They’re still hard to avoid: even people who aren’t McLaren fans reference them.

They were his attempt to sum up the animation medium in a few poetic sentences. As he put it:

• Animation is not the art of drawings-that-move but the art of movements-that-are-drawn.

• What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame.

• Animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames.1

Many have wrestled with this definition over the years. It’s a little koan-like. Still, it has a meaning. What’s not well known is that McLaren was drawing a line here: trends that bothered him were rising in animation, and he put forward his ideas in response. For him, these were the rules of animation — and work he disliked was breaking them.