The Animation of Canadian Culture: Norman McLaren and the National Film Board

There is no worse title one could attribute to McLaren, as the press at times do nowadays, than “the Walt Disney of Canada”, which is understandable only as an attempt to attribute a genius comparable to that of Disney to McLaren. In fact, nothing makes him comparable to the “Wizard of Burbank”, indeed in many aspects McLaren represents to opposite of the Disney model (and American model generally) based on the mass production of animated cartoons. We may even interpret McLaren’s efforts to use the technical and expressive diversity of the NFB animation films as a stylistic code oriented to the intentional research into the non-standardisation with the dominant model in this field: the American cartoon. McLaren interpreted his own appointment to public service by making animated films at the NFB, starting from his own cinema, the “metaphor” of an irreducible identity, where not only the most diverse experiences and identities of animation live together but where every author is invited to experiment and dialogue with the other languages. In his research into animation cinema McLaren experimented and studied above all the specific nature of this medium: because animation cinema does not reproduce movement, it creates it.