William Norman McLaren (11 April 1914 – 27 January 1987) was a Scottish-Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound. McLaren was also an artist and printmaker, and explored his interest in dance in his films.
His films garnered numerous awards, including one Oscar, one Palme d'Or, three BAFTA Awards and six Venice Film Festival awards.
Norman McLaren was born in Stirling, Scotland, on 11 April 1914. He had two older siblings, one brother, Jack and a sister, Sheena. At the age of 21, he travelled to the Soviet Union for a holiday which confirmed his communist beliefs, although his father had paid for the trip in hopes of dispelling them.
When McLaren was 22, he left Stirling and studied set design at the Glasgow School of Art. While there, he joined the Kinecraft Society; within the society, he began to experiment with different styles and techniques of filmmaking. It was also at the Glasgow School of Art that McLaren met Helen Biggar. McLaren and Biggar produced films together outside the School and sought to have their productions released nationally.
His early experiments with film and animation included actually scratching and painting the film stock itself, as he did not have ready access to a camera. One of his earliest extant films, Seven Till Five (1933), a "day in the life of an art school" was influenced by Eisenstein and displays a strongly formalist attitude.
McLaren's film Camera Makes Whoopee (1935), was a more elaborate take on the themes explored in Seven Till Five, inspired by his acquisition of a Ciné-Kodak camera, which enabled him to execute a number of 'trick' shots. McLaren used what would later be called 'pixilation' effects, superimpositions and animation not only to display the staging of an art school ball, but also to tap into the aesthetic sensations supposedly produced by this event.
His two early films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where fellow Scot and future NFB founder John Grierson was a judge.
Grierson, who was at that time head of the UK General Post Office film unit, saw another of his movies at an amateur film festival and hired McLaren. McLaren worked at the GPO from 1936 to 1939, making eight films including Defence of Madrid, Book Bargain (1937), Mony a Pickle, Love on the Wing (1938), and News for the Navy (1938).
McLaren then moved to New York City in 1939, just as World War II was about to begin in Europe. With a grant from the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, he worked in New York until 1941, making drawn-on-film animated works, including Boogie-Doodle (1940), along with Dots, Loops and Stars and Stripes.
In 1941, at the invitation of Grierson, McLaren moved to Ottawa to work for the National Film Board and open an animation studio and to train Canadian animators. Upon his arrival in Canada, he made two films with the American director Mary Ellen Bute—Spook Sport and Tarantella. Grierson asked him to direct a promotional film reminding Canadians to mail their Christmas cards early, Mail Early (1941). He then worked on animated shorts as well as maps for Allied propaganda documentary films, followed by his War Bonds campaign films: V for Victory (1941), 5 for 4 (1942), Hen Hop (1942), Dollar Dance (1943) and Tic Tac Toe (1943). In 1943, he also produced the six-film series of animated French songs, Chants Populaire. In 1944 and 1945, he would do a similar series in English with Let's All Sing Together.
As of 1942, McLaren could no longer keep up with the demands for animation at the fast-growing NFB, and he was asked by Grierson to recruit art students and create a small animation team, a task made more difficult because many young students had gone off to fight in the war. McLaren found recruits for his fledgling animation unit at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Ontario College of Art, including René Jodoin, George Dunning, Jim McKay, Grant Munro and his future collaborator, Evelyn Lambart. McLaren trained these emerging animators, who would all work on cartoons, animated cards and propaganda documentaries before going on to make their own films. Studio A, the NFB's first animation studio, formally came into existence as of January 1943, with McLaren as its head.
During his work for the NFB, McLaren made 70 films, including Begone Dull Care (1949), Rythmetic (1956), Christmas Cracker (1963), Pas de Deux (1968), and the Oscar-winning Neighbours (1952), which is a brilliant combination of visuals and sound, and has a strong social message against violence and war. McLaren won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film for Blinkity Blank (1955), which he later selected as his diploma piece when he was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1974.
In addition to film, McLaren worked with UNESCO in the 1950s and 1960s on programs to teach film and animation techniques in China and India. His five part "Animated Motion" shorts, produced in the late 1970s, are an excellent example of instruction on the basics of film animation.
McLaren is remembered for his experiments with image and sound as he developed a number of groundbreaking techniques for combining and synchronizing animation with music. Emilio Martí López argues that McLaren's homosexuality can be found in his experimental animation, observing that his techniques of abstract and experimental animation avoid the gender binary.
The National Film Board honoured McLaren by naming its Montreal head office building the Norman McLaren Building. The Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent, which is home to the NFB, has also honoured McLaren by naming a borough district after him.
In 1979, the new Edinburgh Filmhouse included two seats dedicated to McLaren and Grierson.
In 2006, McLaren was the subject of a short animated documentary McLaren's Negatives. Also in 2006, the Film Board marked the 65th anniversary of NFB animation with an international retrospective of McLaren's restored classics and a new DVD box set of his complete works.
In June 2013, the NFB released an iTunes app entitled "McLaren's Workshop," allowing users to create their own films using animation techniques utilized by McLaren and providing access to over fifty of his films.