Norman McLaren Movies

An ordinary-looking chair refuses to be sat upon.

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...

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

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...

In this Oscar-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors....

An animated film drawn entirely in pastels. Various fantastical plant-like things "grow" from the ground, eventually launching five spheres. The...

Norman McLaren was a cinematic genius who made films without cameras, and music without instruments. He produced sixty films in a stunning range of...

In this extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip....

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the...

A portrait of John Grierson, the first Canadian Government Film Commissioner and founder of the National Film Board in 1939. Interweaving archival...

Norman McLaren instructs Grant Munro on the movements he is to make. The film technique for Two Bagatelles is pixillation, where the actor is...

In this early film Norman McLaren shot crystal formations through a low-power microscope, using polarized light with the lower part of the picture...

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

Rythmetic is a 1956 Canadian short animated film directed by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart where numbers are the main characters.

An experiment in pure design by film artists Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart. Lines, ruled directly on film, move with precision and grace against...

An experimental film in which both sound and visuals were created entirely by McLaren drawing directly upon the film with ordinary pen and ink. The...

Experimental film showing a day's activities at the Glasgow College of Art.

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...

Animation featuring dancing black and white shadows.

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...