Norman McLaren: Boogie-Doodle, Neighbours, Mosaic Naomi (Vee) Smith 104462536 William Norman McLaren, born April 11th 1914 and died January 27th 1987, is by far one of the most important figures in animation history and still inspires modern animation to this day. Born in Stirling Scotland, he left the town at the age of 22 to study set design at the Glasgow School of Art. Upon joining the Kinecraft Society there, McLaren started to experiment with many different and unique ways of filmmaking as well as meeting friends and collaborators Helen Biggar and Stewart McAllister. McLaren It was while making Camera makes Whoopee (1935) at the GSA that McLaren started using ‘pixilation’ alongside his previously developed skills of scratching and painting on the film reel, the earliest surviving example of which being Seven Til Five (1935). Later in 1936 current head of the UK General Post Offices film unit and fellow Scottsman John Grierson hired McLaren at the GPO for three years where he created and helped create eight films, including Defense of Madrid (1937) and News for the Navy (1938). These were formative years for McLaren where he learned his discipline, something missing during his time at GSA. Just before starting at the GPO, he worked as a cameraman on the earlier Defense of Madrid, a documentary by Ivor Montagu on the Spanish Civil War. Witnessing the carnage in Spain had shaken the Scottsman to his core, leaving a decisive mark on him and his career. In 1939 he emigrated to the United States, feeling war was imminent in Europe and not wanting to relive the horrors he saw in Spain. It would only be two years after that in which McLaren would arrive in the home of his future life and career, Canada. Before then he worked independently in New York for two years, having received a grant from the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation. He spent that time in New York making drawn-on-film animated works like Boogie-Doodle (1940). McLaren moved to Ottawa, Canada in 1941 to work for the National Film Board of Canada at the request of his old friend and collaborator John Grierson, who was head of the NFB at the time. McLaren was to open an animation studio and to train Canadian animators. In 1942 McLaren could no longer keep up with the demands of the NFBs animation studio, which was growing at an extreme rate. He was tasked to recruit new art students to create a small animation team, a task made harder by many students fighting in the war. He managed to create a small team out of Ontario College of Art graduates. While head of animation at the NFB he made 70 films, including Oscar winning Neighbours (1952) and film festival darling Mosaic (1965). These two and the above-mentioned Boogie-Doodle being analyzed below due to how they broadly show McLarens audio skills, abstract mind and cinematic themes of fun, freedom and war. Boogie-Doodle is a collaboration between musician Albert Ammons and McLaren. A short film simply following two shapeshifting dots as they dance around on screen the Ammons Boogie. If both parts are looked at separately, they are individually pleasing. The Boogie, being a well made song on its own, the Doodle being a very competent showing of animation with fun movement. Working together however, they act like a force multiplier, achieving something beyond even the combined sum of their parts. McLaren often is credited as a person with Synesthesia, himself having the ability to see sounds and visualize them. Working together with Ammons Boogie, the dots and McLaren aren’t working with the music, they are an integral part of the music, seeing the way the notes play off each other, the back and forth between the music and the fight of the melody, it is an impressive showing of how McLaren works immensely close with sound for his visuals, as one cannot exist without the other for him. Neighbours is arguably the most successful film McLaren made, having won an Oscar and nominated for a second. Masterful use of Pixilation in tandem with an escalating soundtrack are used to demonstrate McLarens hatred of war and his thoughts of its pointlessness. Created in response to a short stay in the People’s Republic of China and witnessing the beginnings of Mao’s Revolution and the onset of the Korean War, it stars Jean-Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro as representations of French Canada and English Canada respectively. The two men start as friendly neighbours, who discover a flower growing between their houses. At first they are in mutual ecstasy over the flower, until one of them decides to take ownership of it, causing their fight to ensue. Starting with building fences, or borders around the flower it slowly devolves into physical violence, causing the men to slowly lose their refined clothing and grow more primal in appearance as the music gets more energetic and percussive as the fight grows in violence. Eventually the fight is all the men care about, trampling the flower which caused the fight in the process. They destroy each other's homes and kill the opposite wives and kids, until eventually the men kill each other, graves forming over them, and a flower growing on each. The film ends with a simple call to “Love Your Neighbour” in fourteen languages. The film struck a chord with many people worldwide, even winning the Oscar that year for best documentary. The music was a mix of McLarens scratching on film reel technique and recorded percussion instruments for the primal fighting, working in tandem with the two actors Mosaic is one of McLarens later works, and one of his most avant-garde pieces for the time. It is simply a dot that is set into motion, dividing ever forth into more and more dots until a colourful mosaic is formed and comes undone back to the dot by the end. The audio, painted onto the strip by McLaren is an extension of the dots. Both being created with such precise and delicate detail that it is the biggest embodiment of what McLaren wanted in his films. The marriage of sound and visuals, synesthetic visuals. Without the music, it is just a carefully created dot show, but the music informs the dots, you can’t have the dots colliding and hitting screen edges without the sound. The height of McLarens synesthetic cinema References Stratton, C. (2017, May 10). Why we owe a lot to animator Norman McLaren. YouTube. Retrieved March 25, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BeCPbNZ74s Schaffer, B. (2014, June 4). Senses of cinema. Senses of Cinema. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/cteq/norman_mclaren/ Dobson, T. (2023, March 21). Norman McLaren: A late, Great animator now drawing applause. The Conversation. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://theconversation.com/norman-mclaren-a-late-great-animator-now-drawing-applause -27506 Glassman, M. (2009, August 17). Norman McLaren: Animation genius created poetry. Playback. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://playbackonline.ca/2009/08/17/mclaren-20090817/ North, D. (2010, December 4). The significance of sound in Norman McLaren's films. Spectacular Attractions. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://drnorth.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/the-significance-of-sound-in-norman-mclaren% E2%80%99s-films/ St-Pierre, M. (2011, December 23). 70 years of animation, part 2 - Norman McLaren. NFB Blog. Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2011/12/01/70-years-of-animation-part-2-norman-mclaren/ Ross, D. (n.d.). National Library of Scotland. Biography of 'Glasgow School of Art Kinecraft Society (GSAKS)' - Moving Image Archive catalogue. Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://movingimage.nls.uk/biography/10055 Dobson, N. (2017). Norman McLaren: Between the Frames (Animation: Key Films/ Filmmakers). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501328800 Boogie-Doodle. (2011). Mosaic. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZs5kwNwVs0. National Film Board of Canada production company. (1952). Neighbours. Canada. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aSowDUUaY. National Film Board of Canada. (1966). Mosaic. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.nfb.ca/film/mosaic/. nerickso. (2017, February 13). Norman McLaren and Synesthesia. Experimental Sound Synthesis. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/57-344/s2017/norman-mclaren-and-synesthesia/
