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....

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

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

An ordinary looking chair refuses to be sat upon.

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

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

This animated short from Norman McLaren features a human skull cautioning Canadians to “keep their mouths shut” in an effort to end...

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...

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 experiment in pure design by film artists Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart. Lines, ruled directly on film, move with precision and grace against...

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

A color cocktail by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, translating into moving patterns of color and light the moods of music written for a jazz...

Montage and animation in two Acts: the preparation for the Glasgow Arts School Ball; and the ball itself.

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...

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Daedalus weaves a tale of ambition and caution through an ancient myth, set in a...

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

A documentary showing Norman McLaren working on the hand-drawn sound process he uses for his short film, Loops.

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

Norman McLaren made Scherzo early after his arrival in North America in 1939, but the film was subsequently lost. In 1984 the original materials were...