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

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.

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...

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

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

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...

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...

Norman McLaren attempts to give the opening speech for the first Montreal International Film Festival, but his microphone won't cooperate.

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...

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

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...

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

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

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

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...

An animated film in which colored shapes dance to calliope music. The visuals were drawn by Norman McLaren directly upon the film with pen and ink....

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