Norman McLaren

There is a theme in Canadian film and animation of impressive Scottish artists setting the standards of cinema. Norman McLaren was one of them. An entire book could be written about his life as an animator in Canada, but it would still barely cover how beautiful and complex his career was.

For those who have never heard of him, McLaren, the youngest of three children, was born in Stirling, Scotland, on 11 April 1914. He would become a legend. His legendary passion drove him to create foundational techniques that countless animation and art industries use. Throughout his lifetime, he shaped Canadian Culture and Canada’s global image and countlessly promoted love, anti-war sentiments, inclusivity, and peace. He pioneered keyframe animation, pixilation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, and graphical sound techniques.

Norman Mclaren was, and rightfully so, Canada's foremost animator. He founded Studio A, the National Film Board of Canada's animation division. He would recruit fellow Canadian animation legends René Jodoin, George Dunning, Jim McKay, Grant Munro, and collaborator Evelyn Lambart. His films garnered numerous awards, including one Oscar, one Palme d'Or, three BAFTA Awards, and six Venice Film Festival awards.

When the NFB became a pioneer in animation during and after World War 2, Norman McLaren was the man behind it all. 

McLaren studied interior design at the Glasgow School of Art from 1932 to 1936 and started making animations as a teenager in Scotland.  His processes were described as lying back with his eyes closed, listening to music on the radio, and watching dancing shapes projected by his mind. He started making films, always with “a musical script” instead of dialogue, and attempting a “visual translation of the music.” During his time there, he became interested in motion pictures and experimental film, leading him to set up a production group for himself and his fellow students. As he couldn’t afford a camera, he washed off the emulsion from a cinema’s discarded 35mm reel and painted directly onto each frame.

One of the major factors that drove Norman into film was his communist beliefs. As a teenager, he greatly loved Russia’s culture and politics. This was mainly due to his growing up during the Great Depression in Scotland. Slums were scattered around the country, poverty was at its worst, and food shortages were everywhere. To Norman, the only thriving country at the time was Russia. He was hypnotized by its wondrous architecture, thriving politics, artistic flare, and theaters.

His extreme focus on Russian ideals bothered his family very deeply. When Norman was 21, his father sent him to Russia to tour the country, thinking this would cure his son of his ideas. However, he gave his son everything he could have dreamed of. Norman visited film and theater festivals and had a grand old time. He even returned a postcard to his childhood friend, remarking; ‘I’m having a very energetic holiday here.” After viewing the films of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Norman was convinced he had to follow in this man’s footsteps. 

As much as Norman enjoyed the idea of communism, he had his limits. In 1936, the Great Purge caused his support of the country’s politics to wane. 

Norman created his first films in 1925. They are lost to time, but they were groundbreaking. He developed his animation style by scratching the surface of film cells and then applying color directly to them. McLaren was always more preoccupied with capturing the movement of characters than the story. These films used some of the newest filming techniques, such as pixelation effects, superimpositions, and animation. 

He would mark a filmstrip’s soundtrack with pencils, pens, brushes, razor blades, and other tools. He was often freehanded. McLaren controlled tone through shape, volume through thickness, and pitch through the number of his slashes into the film strips. One result was the Morse code-like percussion of Mosaic (1965).

Camera Makes Whoopee(1935) and Seven Till Five(1933) won awards at The Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where he first encountered NFB founder John Grierson at age 21. 

"It triggers me off," Mclaren once said. "Often, I have to investigate the technique first and then find the subject matter afterward." Discussing the difference between experiment and art, he said, "An experimenter will get interested in a technique, shoot a lot of material using it, and assemble it in some kind of order which may be interesting to look at - bits of it will be interesting to look album for an artist, shooting the material is just the first stage.”

Norman was quite the rebel. He would downplay situations he was in for his family. He often disappeared on adventures with his camera, would lie to his places of employment about his whereabouts, and would fake illnesses. All in the name of creating art. As much as he hid things from his family, in later years, he would send them letters of love for them. They were there for him no matter what Norman did throughout his life. Their support meant more to him than the entire world.

Mclaren’s first big break was working for The GPO Film Unit, the UK’s General Post Office subdivision. While working at Grierson’s British GPO Film Unit, McLaren noticed that knife marks played back as interesting sounds on a film’s soundtrack. McLaren would then scratch-compose a soundtrack for a film there, but his producer rejected it at the time. 

Following this, McLaren accompanied director Ivor Montague to Spain in 1936 to film Defence of Madrid, a front-line documentary of the struggle against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. This was during the beginning years of Spain’s civil war. This journey and film were not supported or sanctioned by the GPO. Instead, Norman and Ivor hurled themselves into this journey in secret. During this time, he would write back to family and friends (minus his mother and father) and tell them of the looming danger. He assured his parents, before leaving, that he would only be filming refugees at the border. However, this was not the case. Instead, they were in the thick of it. In a letter to his close friend Helen Biggar, he stated: “It's all hush... been told to write for a leave of absence for illness to go for three weeks ... Mr. Grierson knows the truth”. 

Norman's experiences during the Spanish Civil War solidified his anti-war views. For years afterward, he recounted the horrors of what he had witnessed. While working on the world’s first peace film, Hell Unlimited (1936), he recounted the civilian deaths and dismemberment they had witnessed to a friend. 

Norman Mclaren left the GPO unit in 1939 and traveled to New York City to explore animation further. Some of the most famous works he created in the city were Boogie-Doodle (1940), Dots(1940), Loops(1940), and Stars and Stripes. Boogie-Doodle was heavily inspired by African-American jazz pianist Albert Ammons. This film was also distributed through the National Film Board of Canada. He animated the images and sounds of these films to avoid paying for music rights.

During this time, McLaren kept John Grierson updated on his adventures. When 1941 rolled around, Grierson invited him to Canada to work at the NFB. Grierson was interested in opening an animation division for the Film Board, and Norman McLaren appeared to be the perfect fit. He indeed was, and in his first year, he would produce two films with American director Mary Ellen Bute, Spook Sport and Tarantella. During the Second World War, he also assisted in making propaganda films and war bond ads. 

In 1942, the animation division needed to expand. Sydney Newman pointed this out, and McLaren wished to train young animators to continue the department's legacy. Mclaren began visiting art schools in various provinces to recruit students. Some of these schools included École des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Ontario College of Art, now formally known as OCAD University in Toronto. 

McLaren would find five promising people to add to his department. René Jodoin, George Dunning, Jim(James) McKay, Grant Munro, and Evelyn Lambart. These people were the Canadian equivalent of Diseny’s Nine Old Men. But with more freedom. They would assist Norman in creating animated propaganda films, have wildly successful careers of their own, and in 1943 become Studio A—the NFB's first animation studio, with McLaren at its head.

One of the original Five quickly became one of McLaren's fast friends. That man was Grant Monro. Born in Winnipeg, Grant Munro had a career that spanned 43 years. He left a massive mark on the international animation industry and is fondly remembered. 

Scouted out by McLaren at OCAD, he studied under Franklin Carmichael, one of Canada’s renowned painters, famous for being in The Group of Seven. Carmichael would persuade Norman McLaren to visit the school and meet Munro. McLaren would hire Munro immediately after seeing his artistic talent. From there, McLaren would mentor Munro until he left the Film Board shortly after creating his second film. Munro rejoined in 1947 to specifically help Norman McLaren with his Academy Award-winning film Neighbors. The two men believed in each other and would continue to be there for each other and in each other's talents.  In 1957, Munro left the NFB again to become part of the first crew of George Dunning’s animation studio in London, England. This studio was named TV Cartoons (TVC) and mainly worked on commercials and advertising. It is famous for animating The Beatles' Yellow Submarine music video. However, in 1961, Munro returned to the NFB one last time in 1961 to assist Norman in animating  Two Bagatelles (1952), Christmas Cracker (1963), and Canon (1964).

Later in his career, he celebrated his friend’s achievements in a documentary called McLaren on McLaren (1983), documenting his time working with his friend and colleague at the NFB. He formally retired in 1988 and passed away in Montreal in 2017 at the age of 94. 

At the Film Board, McLaren was inspired by musicians such as Maurice Blackburn and Louis Applebaum. Because of this, McLaren was invited to join the National Composers’ Association and lecture at Juilliard and the Acoustical Society of America. John Cage, who helped found some of the first electronic music experiments in the U.S.A., would play McLaren’s music at his New York concerts.

With filmmaker Evelyn Lambart, McLaren developed a deck of pitch cards, a ‘keyboard’ that allowed the exact musical pitches of a piano to be photographed onto a soundtrack. The blips and whirrs of his hand-etched scores created this card-animated music, which resembled synthesizer, 8-bit, or digital music decades in advance. He first used his cards for Now Is the Time (1951), a 3D film with a parallel multidimensional audio system of independent speakers wrapped around the audience. He used the same cards for Neighbours (1952), his most famous film.

A National Film Board Short, Pen Point Percussion(1951), was a “hand-drawn sound introduction” to Norman Mclaren's work. It covered the fundamental processes of how sound is captured into film, providing an excellent glimpse into sound processes for film. This is a snippet of the narration:

“Well, if a sound makes a pattern in a film, a pattern in a film will make a sound. You can even create your sounds by drawing directly from the film. The motion picture artist Norman McLaren has been making hand-drawn sounds, and now he will hear them for the first time.……”

“That's simple enough, and then there's the tone quality. The shape of the marks controls it. This series of thin, straight lines gives a sharp, unpleasant sound, but these round dots are a bit smoother. The marks can be any shape you like. Now, how about this? Using the brush, Norman tries to make a row of small triangles with these sharp angular forms. What would they sound like? The distance the lines are apart controls pitch, with the lines far apart being a low-pitched, medium, and high note.”

“Now, what can they be used for these hand-drawn sounds? Norman McLaren finds they're a perfectly natural accompaniment to some of his hand-drawn Motion Pictures. Each movement of the screen can have its own specially designed sound-making movies. This way, the artist has direct personal control at every stage of the film's production. Sound and picture are planned and closely related as they are drawn. Now Norman is checking to ensure that each bit of sound is perfectly matched to its accompanying screen action. Finally, the picture and the sound will be printed together at one length of the film, and color will be added during the process.”

McLaren continued to use physical film to create music. He generated animated, electronic, optical-graphical music that sounded like “a small orchestra of clicking, thudding, buzzing, and drumlike timbres.” His work was often classified as “synthetic” music because it didn’t imitate instruments like a keyboard synthesizer. Other filmmakers, including Claude Jutra and the Whitney brothers, also tried their hand at animated sound, but McLaren developed it further than any other.

In 1949, UNESCO sent him to China to instruct artists in preparing simple audiovisual images to encourage tree planting, improve community sanitation, and educate villagers in health care. During this period, he witnessed the change of political regimes and felt the stressful times it brought for the ordinary people with whom he lived and worked. This experience inspired his magnum opus, Neighbours.

One of Mclaren’s other films was called Blinkity Blank(1955). Blinkity Blank employed many techniques of shapes drawn directly onto film. It showed everyday household objects like fruit and umbrellas and a rough narrative involving a bird attempting to escape its cage. Blinkity made great use of sound and used a combination of musical sequences and sound effects created by McLaren in the film to convey its message. McLaren described how one note of his “animated sound” would require 50 individual lines on his 35mm film, and its pitch and intensity were adjustable through the shape and size of the strokes. Even though Norman’s processes were opposite to how we sync graphics for sound in the present day, his processes are still worth learning. 

At the NFB, McLaren would refine and create some of the most essential animation documents worldwide. One of these books was Cameraless Animation, published in 1958 by the Informational and Promotional Division at The NFB. This book is a reprint from its original 1949 release by UNESCO, entitled How To Make Animated Movies Without a Camera, by Norman McLaren. However, it contains a step-by-step informational setup of how to animate freehand with your available limited resources. 

According to Norman McLaren, there are six main steps to start building an animation stand. A chair for the artist to sit on, a table for the artist to sit at ( fixed securely on the table at an angle to comfort the artist while drawing.), a board, a hole about 2" by 10" (50 mm. X250 mm.) cut in the board. A lamp, mirror, and a vast sheet of white card are placed on the table behind the hole to illuminate or reflect skylight or daylight through it, and two strips of wood would be necessary to provide support and be fixed vertically onto the board.

McLaren would primarily use three types of methods for low-budget animation. The direct way is ink drawings on paper, chalk drawings erased and redrawn, and finally, the flat-puppet method adapted from Lotte Reiniger. McLaren also worked on refining and developing other techniques. Chalk River Ballet (1950) used painted metal cut-outs for abstract-ends. However, the film was not released due to a lack of suitable music and reappeared as Spheres in 1969.

Norman McLaren would make over 60 films for the National Film Board. All of them he would take extreme pride in making. Norman always considered how his films would be used in the media. He was self-aware that they could be used for different agendas and always wanted them to address the social needs of the times. Many of his films, including Neighbours (1952), involved anti-war and anti-military themes. McLaren once said, “If all of my films were burning in a fire. I think I’d prefer Neighbours to be saved.” Grant Munroe and Jean-Paul LaDouceur (animators) were the stars in Neighbors, and the film won the Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subject in 1953.  

Neighbors employs pixilation (figures are "animated" into movement by filming one frame at a time and moving the objects between frames) to tell the tale of two neighbors who come to mutual destruction over possessing one tiny flower. The pixilation process allows for a limitless range of human movement, carrying the characters to deliberately exaggerated lengths to drive home the film's solid anti-war statement. 

The film was an instant hit and screened worldwide. According to a Cinema Canada retrospective on McLaren, everyone except Ronald Reagan and Mikail Gorbachev had seen it. The reporter also pointed out that the film's length, 8 minutes and 10 seconds, is the amount of time it takes for a ray of sunshine from the sun to reach the Earth. McLaren was described as the sun; his film was a ray of sunshine. 

Norman McLaren’s processes were built around his audiences. “I Always have the audience in the back of my mind. Very often, an ill-defined audience. (Sometimes) as a more clearly defined audience. When making Rythmetic(1956), I thought about children and hoped it would help them be interested in numbers. But even in any film, no matter how abstract or concrete, I think 1 has an audience in mind. I keep thinking of a group of people watching that film and looking out for the possibility of them getting bored. I think this is the filmmaker's task - you're given this amount of time, and you've got a captured audience, and you must keep them interested throughout that whole space of time and not let their interest flag. I'm terrified of letting an audience get bored."

McLaren would speak on his processes.  "When I see a painting on the wall, I don't think of all the stages that led up to that. No, it is a complete work in itself. Still, in my painting experience, I've been very conscious that they slowly evolve. That process seemed to me to be more important than the final result. When I do a painting, I'm not a good painter at all, and I don't know when to stop. The whole thing is a process of chopping and changing around. I'm more fascinated by the chopping and changing around than the final thing. This naturally ted to trying to channel this into filmmaking."

Synchromy (1971), one of the last of McLaren’s many films, could be best described as a moving kaleidoscope on screen, and the images presented correspond to the soundtrack. The part of the filmstrip that contained the audio, McLaren colored, multiplied, and reorganized to look synchronized for viewing. Filming him writing the ‘perpetual motion’ tune on a piano for Synchromy, photographing pitch cards to match it, and finally transforming the soundtrack into visuals, the BBC documentary The Eye Hears, the Ear Sees (1971) documented him and explained that “this man is doing something that no one in the world has ever done before: he’s writing a film on the piano.”

His last film, Narcissus(1983), is an ode to his partner Guy Glover. As well as a statement on the anti-LGBQT+ sentiment of the times. A fellow producer at the NFB. Guy Glover and Norman Mclaren met at the National Ballet of London in 1937 and stayed with each other till their deaths. 

Guy wasn’t just some guy. John Grierson also hired Glover to join the National Film Board, and his story is also acclaimed. Glover would follow McLaren to New York and stay with him while he produced his first animated films. When Norman was invited to Canada, Guy was also given a producing role at the NFB. This started with an apprenticeship with NFB founder John Grierson. He helped produce and write over 200 films in 35 years. He would first arrive at the National Film Board as McLaren’s “First Assistant,” later he moved to Canada Carries On Unit. He was a director, producer, executive producer, and the first director of the French-language production branch from 1944 to 1953. The only two animated films directed by Glover were Lining the Blues(1939) and Marching the Colours(1952). 

It took McLaren over 30 years to make Narcissus, as the climate was unsuitable for the film's themes. Norman is quoted in his last film as saying, “I, myself, would gladly come out (& officially), but I wish to respect the feelings of my partner—someone whom I have lived with for the last forty-five years." McLaren also claimed that the final Narcissus would have been even gayer than it turned out had it not been for factors beyond his control.

The film follows the tale of the Greek Mythology figure Narcissus through a ballet dancer. The dancer is presented with male and female options to dance with and slightly leans towards the male. The film ends with Narcissus trapped in a jail cell. This film was distributed through the NFB, and McLaren started working on it in 1972. The delays were caused mainly by Guy, who feared both would be outed if the film was released. McLaren and Glover were in the closet for most of their lives. Glover was more closed off about the topic than McLaren was and fairly protective of his partner. Glover and McLaren lived during the height of the Lavender scare in Canada, and being outed would not have meant the death of their careers but also Norman McLaren’s status as a national icon. Glover can be credited as one of the main reasons Mclaren’s legacy was never overshadowed by his sexuality. 

Upon viewing the film, the subtly works out fine. Anything else would have been too overbearing. Guy also tried to give Norm critiques from a producer's perspective. Whether you enjoy the subject matter or not, you still have to respect the fantastic post-production effects in the film. The mirroring trailing effects sell the mythology. 

Many said McLaren was so complex that people who worked with him for decades did not understand him. He was described as dressing like a college boy from the 1940s, looking 20 years younger than he was, and having a sense of naive optimism that most had forgotten about themselves.

In 1945, McLaren handed over the NFB animation department to Jim McKay. Jim would later split the department into two divisions: French and English. René Jodoin headed the French division. 

Norman McLaren retired from animation in 1983. The entire 400-person staff of the National Film Board of Canada was in attendance to say goodbye. Norman McLaren died in 1987 in Hudson, Quebec, with his partner by his side. Guy Glover would die just over a year later, at age 77, of natural causes and a broken heart. 

The announcement of his death was simple. A single notice was placed on a bulletin board outside The National Film Board cafeteria to ring the time of his passing. It simply read, “Tuesday, January 27, 1987. Norman Mclaren passed away yesterday at 1:15 p.m. There will be no funeral or memorial service. Please do not send flowers or donations."

The day after his death, the National Film Board, where he spent 43 years, was quiet. The joy was gone, and the feeling that was described was that it was a devastating loss of life but one of inspiration and purpose. A moment of silence was organized to honor Mclaren. The flag was lowered to half-mast, and the staff and reporters stood alone in the cold and snow, watching it for over four minutes.

For Glover, a tribute was planned in Montreal. It was a simple funeral with family and friends and was held in late May. Glover had requested that his death be kept in a low profile. However, the Cinematheque Quebecoise scheduled an event on Thursday, Sept. 1, 1988, to show a retrospective of Glover's work and honor his legacy. 

'In the corner of that province is to be found the little garden of Norman McLaren, whose films talk only through image and movement." McLaren's mentor, John Grierson, said."Like any other filmmaker, the animator realizes what a pure movie is. Be sure that McLaren has been one of its greatest exponents."