Norman McLaren's Animation

Norman McLaren was a Scottish-born animator and has done most of his work for the National Film Board of Canada. His films notably won awards at BAFTA, the Oscars, and the Berlin International Film Festivals. He mainly used techniques such as Direct animation (drawn-on-film), drawn sound, and pixilation, which means he created most of his films by directly working on the film stock, by scratching it, painting it and drawing on it, creating both the images and the sounds analogically.

I find his work so interesting because he was one of the pioneers in combining music with animation,  and his technique is really great. The technology has advanced a lot since his time but it's still interesting to compare his work with the work of today's artists and notice how it is less about the tools you use and mainly about what idea you have and the way you communicate it.

Here are some of his most famous Drawn-on-film animations, and below there's a video explaining his drawn-sound technique.

Neighbours

Alright this is a real throwback but don't a good one worth checking out. Norman McLaren was a Canadian filmmaker who was really revolutionary in the field of Animation. He did a lot of hand drawn work were he would animate directly on celluloid film. McLaren also worked a lot with sound, actually creating soundtracks by marking up film as well.

His 1952 film, Neighbours, actually won him an Oscar for Best Documentary. Neighbours is a lot like a pixelated film using stop motion techniques to animate the characters. Like I said before, McLaren worked a lot with sound, and I love the way the soundtrack of this film interacts with the action. The message of the film is great too. It gets at this idea of the competing neighbors and how sharing is often lost in lieu of possession. McLaren was way ahead of his time, definitely worth checking out his works.

Catch Me If You Can

 

I absolutely love this title sequence for Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can" (2002). I think it does a fantastic job at setting the stage for this great cat and mouse crime thriller. It also does a great job at introducing the amazing score by John Williams. This might be a stretch, but the animation reminds me a little bit of the hand animations of Norman McLaren. The way in which the lines interact with the pacing of the music is a lot like the way objects interact with the music in McLaren films.