Norman McLaren Movies

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

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

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

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 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...

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

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

Mixes with still images, 1940s. A large collection of McLaren's surrealist illustrations. Silent film.

An animated short film about The Four Seasons by Norman McLaren.

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...

A playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the...

An attempt to animate an abstract Charlie Chaplin-esque figure.

"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.

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

To the tune of a classic French-Canadian nonsense song, surreal blackbird made of lines loses body parts and gets them back threefold.

This uncompleted film uses a technique invented by McLaren in the 1930s; the travelling zoom. McLaren's intention was to make the corridor gradually...

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

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...

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

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