Norman McLaren Movies

An ordinary-looking chair refuses to be sat upon.

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

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the...

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...

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

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

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

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

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

An unfinished animated short from the late 1950s.

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

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

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

Norman McLaren was a cinematic genius who made films without cameras, and music without instruments. He produced sixty films in a stunning range of...

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

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

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...

A play on the theme of hearts. Two hearts cavort, change shape, shoot arrows at one another, give birth, and finally become one heart bearing the...