Review of Nichola Dobson. Norman McLaren: Between the Frames, New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2018. McLaren’s film Neighbours (1952) changed the trajectory of my life. As a trainee art teacher on viewing the film with a group of schoolchildren (who were…
‘Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.’ (Norman McLaren) This quote can be recited by heart by most people in the animation field, usually in the pursuit of the…
Norman McLaren infamously posits that he probably became a filmmaker because he had been unable to be a dancer or choreographer. While one can argue that the underlying concern of his work is movement, one can also posit that McLaren’s…
Norman McLaren said “every film is a kind of dance”[1] and that “an abstract film has much greater affinity to music, ballet and dance than it has to any kind of abstract painting.”[2] He said he might have wanted to…
It seems unimaginable that Norman McLaren might have once relinquished animation for still imagery. Perhaps more shocking still, the illustrious Scot had already begun his decades long career at the National Film Board of Canada when a new non-moving vocation…
