North of the Border

An entirely different kind of approach from anything preceding it was pioneered by Norman McLaren, working in the National Film Board of Canada. This was to draw directly onto the film, applying the coloured image frame by frame, often creating a synthetic soundtrack the same way. In Begone, Dull Care, Fiddle De Dee and Boogie Doodle, he set purely abstract designs to music and made odd nightmare figures and linger paintings dance to jazz—the first man to make a musical out of the Rorschach test.

McLaren experiments with other methods also, for instance with cut out figures as in Rhythmetic, in which numerals jump around anthropomorphically, or with his "pixillation" technique in which live actors are photographed with stop-action photography and treated frame by frame as drawings, as in Love Thy Neighbour and Chairy Tale.

But McLaren too is settling into a groove and repeating himself, as in new creations like Short And Suite, with old material treated in old ways.

In England, the same thing has happened to Halas and Batchelor, who have neglected such early works as Animal Farm and become more or less a source of thinly disguised advertising blurbs for oil companies and other big manufacturers.