Norman McLaren Movies

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 ordinary looking chair refuses to be sat upon.

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

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

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

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

An experimental short film of images and music made by Norman McLaren.

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

In this short film by Norman McLaren, dancers enact the Greek tragedy of Narcissus, the beautiful youth whose excessive self-love condemned him to a...

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

Three separate sequences related to Christmas, animated in different styles: cutout animation of children dancing in the snow to "Jingle Bells,"...

Documentary on savings

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

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...

One of a series of French-Canadian folk songs, this film was illustrated by Norman McLaren for the Chants populaires series. White gouache drawings...

An animation film, made without the use of a camera, in which "boogie" played by Albert Ammons and "doodle" drawn by Norman McLaren combine to make a...

This joyful short animation features a dancing hen that transforms into an egg. The film was made without a camera by Norman McLaren, who drew...

In this fifth part, Norman McLaren deals not with motion (if motion is defined as a change of location in two- or three-dimensional space) but with...

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