Norman McLaren

Based on Wikipedia: Norman McLaren

The Man Who Made Movies Without a Camera

Imagine scratching directly onto film stock with a needle, frame by frame, creating animation without ever pointing a camera at anything. That's how Norman McLaren got his start—not because he was avant-garde, but because he couldn't afford a camera.

This Scottish-born animator would go on to win an Oscar, a Palme d'Or at Cannes, and fundamentally reshape what animation could be. But what makes McLaren's story so compelling isn't just his accolades. It's how he turned every limitation into invention, every constraint into creative breakthrough.

From Stirling to the Soviet Union

McLaren was born in Stirling, Scotland, in 1914—the same year World War One began. He grew up with an older brother Jack and sister Sheena, in a family comfortable enough that his father could afford to send him on a holiday to the Soviet Union when he was twenty-one.

Here's the irony: his father hoped the trip would cure young Norman of his communist sympathies. It had the opposite effect. Seeing the Soviet experiment firsthand only confirmed McLaren's leftist beliefs.

At twenty-two, he enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art to study set design. But it was the Kinecraft Society—a film club at the school—that would determine his life's trajectory. Without access to proper equipment, McLaren began experimenting with what he had: raw film stock, paint, and whatever tools he could improvise.

The Birth of Direct Animation

What McLaren discovered out of necessity would become one of animation's most influential techniques: drawn-on-film animation. Rather than photographing drawings or objects, he painted and scratched directly onto the celluloid itself. Each frame became a tiny canvas, roughly the size of a postage stamp.

His 1935 film Seven Till Five—essentially "a day in the life of an art school"—showed the influence of Sergei Eisenstein, the legendary Soviet filmmaker known for revolutionary editing techniques. McLaren was already thinking about cinema as something more than recorded reality.

That same year, he acquired his first real camera, a Ciné-Kodak, and made Camera Makes Whoopee. The title alone tells you something about McLaren's playful sensibility. He used what would later be called "pixilation"—a technique where live actors are filmed frame by frame, making them move in jerky, unnatural ways, as if they were stop-motion puppets. He layered in superimpositions and animations to capture not just an art school ball, but the feeling of being at one.

Both films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival. One of the judges was John Grierson, a fellow Scot who would soon found the National Film Board of Canada—and who would change McLaren's life twice over.

The Documentary Movement and War

Grierson was running the General Post Office Film Unit in Britain, part of a movement that believed documentary film could educate and uplift the public. He hired McLaren in 1936, and for three years the young animator made films for the GPO—including Love on the Wing, a surrealist advertisement for airmail that featured metamorphosing shapes and playful absurdity.

But war was coming. In 1939, as Europe plunged into conflict, McLaren crossed the Atlantic to New York City.

A grant from the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation let him continue his experiments. He made Boogie-Doodle in 1940—a joyful, jazz-inflected piece of drawn-on-film animation. He made Dots, Loops, and Stars and Stripes. He was refining his techniques, learning what happened when you painted rhythm itself onto celluloid.

Building Canadian Animation

In 1941, Grierson reached out again. He had established the National Film Board of Canada—usually called the NFB—and he wanted McLaren to come to Ottawa. Not just to make films, but to build something: an animation studio from scratch, training Canadian animators who could serve the war effort.

McLaren arrived and immediately collaborated with American director Mary Ellen Bute on two films. Then Grierson gave him his first official NFB assignment: convince Canadians to mail their Christmas cards early. The resulting film, Mail Early, was pure McLaren—inventive animation in service of the most mundane possible goal.

What followed was a flood of wartime propaganda. V for Victory. 5 for 4 (about war bonds). Hen Hop. Dollar Dance. Tic Tac Toe. McLaren was turning out films at remarkable speed, but by 1942, he couldn't keep up with demand alone.

Grierson asked him to recruit and train a team. This was wartime—young artists had enlisted, making recruitment difficult. But McLaren found students at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Ontario College of Art. Names that would become important in animation history: René Jodoin, George Dunning, Jim McKay, Grant Munro, and Evelyn Lambart, who would become McLaren's most significant collaborator.

Studio A, the NFB's first animation unit, officially came into existence in January 1943. McLaren was twenty-eight years old.

The Experiments Begin in Earnest

The war ended, but McLaren's output only accelerated. Over his career at the NFB, he would make seventy films. Some were collaborations, some solo works, but all bore his distinctive mark: an obsession with the relationship between image and sound.

Consider what McLaren was doing that almost no one else attempted. He wasn't just synchronizing animation to music—he was creating synthetic sound by drawing directly on the film's optical soundtrack. The same strip of celluloid that carried the images could carry audio, encoded as patterns that the projector's light would translate into sound waves. McLaren drew those patterns by hand.

This meant he could compose music and create images as a single unified act. The visual and the auditory emerged from the same gestures, the same materials, the same frames.

Neighbours: The Oscar-Winning Masterpiece

In 1952, McLaren made Neighbours, and it remains his most famous work.

The premise is simple. Two men live in identical houses side by side. A flower grows on the boundary between their properties. They fight over it—first with escalating hostility, then with cartoon violence, then with genuine horror. By the film's end, both men are dead, their families destroyed, the flower trampled.

The technique was pixilation: the actors moved frame by frame, giving their movements an uncanny, puppet-like quality. They slide across the grass impossibly. They float through the air. The stylization makes the violence both funnier and more disturbing—you're watching something that looks like a comedy but feels like a nightmare.

Neighbours won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. (Yes, documentary—the categories were different then, and pixilation's use of real actors blurred the lines.) It remains one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made, achieving in eight minutes what most feature films can't accomplish in two hours.

The film emerged from McLaren's pacifist convictions, the same beliefs that had drawn him to the Soviet Union as a young man. But it succeeded because of technique: the way pixilation strips humanity down to mechanism, the way synthetic sound creates an atmosphere of controlled hysteria.

The Golden Age: Begone Dull Care to Pas de Deux

McLaren's filmography through the 1950s and 1960s reads like a catalog of innovation.

Begone Dull Care (1949), made with Evelyn Lambart, set painted-on-film abstraction to jazz by the Oscar Peterson Trio. The colors pulse and streak and dance; you're watching music made visible. It won awards in Berlin and Venice.

Blinkity Blank (1955) took scratched-on-film to new extremes. McLaren etched images into black leader—the opaque film used between reels—creating bursts of white shapes against darkness. Intermittent imagery appeared and vanished too quickly for the conscious mind to fully process. The film won the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes and a BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film. When McLaren was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1974, he chose it as his diploma piece—the single work he wanted to represent his artistic achievement.

Rythmetic (1956), another Lambart collaboration, animated numbers themselves. Digits march, multiply, divide, and dance in a witty visualization of arithmetic as choreography.

A Chairy Tale (1957), co-directed with Claude Jutra, used pixilation to tell the story of a young man who cannot sit in a chair—the chair keeps evading him. It's a comedy about consent and cooperation, told without words.

Lines: Vertical (1960) and Lines: Horizontal (1962) reduced animation to its barest elements: colored lines moving across the screen, synchronized to music McLaren composed by drawing on the soundtrack. These films influenced generations of abstract animators and video artists.

And then there was Pas de deux (1968).

Dance, Frozen and Multiplied

McLaren had always been fascinated by dance. He'd met his life partner, Guy Glover, at the ballet in London in 1937. Movement itself—the way bodies traced paths through space and time—obsessed him.

Pas de deux applied an optical printing technique to footage of two ballet dancers. Their movements were multiplied, creating trails of ghostly afterimages. A single arabesque became a fan of overlapping forms; a leap left echoes of itself suspended in darkness. Time itself seemed to stretch and layer.

The film won numerous awards and influenced countless music videos, commercials, and films in the decades that followed. Its technique has been replicated digitally many times, but the original retains a luminous quality—the way McLaren worked with light itself, rather than pixels.

Teaching the World

McLaren's influence extended beyond his own films. In the 1950s and 1960s, he worked with UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—teaching film and animation techniques in China and India. He believed in democratizing the medium, sharing what he'd learned.

In the late 1970s, he made a five-part series called Animated Motion, a meticulous instructional guide to the fundamentals of animation. It remains one of the clearest explanations ever produced of how drawn motion creates the illusion of life.

The Personal Life, Long Hidden

McLaren was gay—a fact that was not publicly discussed during most of his lifetime, when such openness could end careers and invite persecution.

He met Guy Glover at the ballet in London in 1937. Glover would also come to work at the NFB as a director and producer. They remained partners for fifty years, until McLaren's death in 1987.

Some scholars have argued that McLaren's homosexuality influenced his artistic choices. His preference for abstract and experimental animation, they suggest, allowed him to work outside the gender binaries that dominated conventional narrative film. Whether or not this interpretation holds, it's worth noting that McLaren found ways to be fully himself as an artist even when he couldn't be fully himself in public.

Honors and Legacy

The awards accumulated throughout McLaren's life. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1968 and elevated to Companion—the highest level—in 1973. He received honorary doctorates, lifetime achievement awards, and festival tributes around the world.

In 1982, he became the first anglophone—that is, the first English-speaker—to receive the Prix Albert-Tessier, Quebec's highest honor in cinema. This was fitting: McLaren had built Quebec's animation tradition from nothing, training French-Canadian animators and making films that celebrated French-Canadian culture.

In 2009, more than two decades after his death, McLaren's works were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme, which identifies documentary heritage of global significance.

The Continuing Influence

George Lucas has cited McLaren as an influence. That might seem surprising—what does abstract animation have to do with Star Wars?—but Lucas understood something essential. McLaren showed that cinema was plastic, malleable, limited only by imagination. The same spirit that drove McLaren to scratch images directly onto film drove Lucas to push visual effects technology into new territories.

In 2018, choreographer Robert Lepage and the National Ballet of Canada created Frame by Frame, a full ballet based on McLaren's life and work. The man who had devoted so much of his art to dance was now himself the subject of dance.

In 2024, nearly four decades after his death, McLaren's musical compositions were released publicly for the first time—those hand-drawn soundtracks finally available as standalone audio.

A Name That Endures

The NFB building in Montreal bears McLaren's name. The borough of Saint-Laurent, home to the National Film Board, has a district named after him. A blue heritage plaque marks his childhood home in Stirling, unveiled by his nephew in 2014 on the centenary of his birth.

But perhaps the most fitting memorial is simpler than any of these: his films still exist, still screen, still astonish. Pull up Neighbours or Begone Dull Care or Pas de deux today, and they don't feel dated. They feel like dispatches from a future we haven't quite reached—a future where the boundaries between sound and image, between live action and animation, between art and technology, have dissolved entirely.

McLaren got there first, with nothing but film stock, paint, and an unwillingness to accept that anything was impossible.