Norman McLaren Movies

The film's soundtrack is an original musical composition produced with synthetic sound - through photographing unusual geometric shapes and running...

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....

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

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 by Norman McLaren is a publicity message for a war bond campaign. Symbols, a stick man and lettering are drawn directly on 35mm...

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

"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...

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...

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

In this short animation film, Norman McLaren presents the first 3 of the 5 categories of motion: constant, accelerated and decelerated. Various types...

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...

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...

Three separate sequences related to Christmas, animated in different styles: cutout animation of children dancing in the snow to "Jingle Bells,"...

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

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...

An unfinished animated short by Norman McLaren.

Made during WWII

This joyful short animation features a dancing hen that transforms into an egg. The film was made without a camera by Norman McLaren, who drew...