Norman McLaren Movies

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...

This 1967 footage shows McLaren at a computer with Evelyn Lambart, Rene Pardo and two other technicians, followed by the animation test some call...

Pinscreen animation makes use of a screen filled with movable pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. The screen is...

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

The fifth thematic mini documentary about revolutionary filmmaker Norman McLaren; this time with a focus on his collaborator Evelyn Lambart.

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

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...

Taking "Isle of the Dead," a work by the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin as his starting point, Norman McLaren creates a deeply...

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....

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." A 7 day vlog during the summer of 2023, a story of dreamers and drowners.

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...

Made during WWII

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

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

This animated short by Norman McLaren serves as a wartime savings campaign. Symbolic figures, drawn directly on 35mm film stock, move and dance...

A gay fantasia of patterned sound in which Norman McLaren salutes the West Indies, painting the spirit of fiesta on film to the lively beat of an...

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

An unfinished animated short from the late 1950s.

The film's soundtrack is an original musical composition produced with synthetic sound - through photographing unusual geometric shapes and running...