Originally from Scotland, Norman McLaren devised new techniques and developed major talents during his many years leading the Animation Unit of the National Film Board of Canada. One of McLaren’s most acclaimed films, “Neighbours” (1952) involves pixilation, a stop-motion technique in which human beings are essentially used as puppets: posed for frame-by-frame shots that are then reinjected with a zany simulation of life.
The original meaning of “pixilated” is eccentric, mentally disordered, or whimsical. As McLaren noted, the technique allowed the film-maker to caricature normal gestures and movements, while also evade the natural laws of physics like “momentum, inertia, centrifugal force and gravity”. The tempo of action could be modulated drastically; objects or persons could be made to appear and disappear at will. All of these tricks feature to exhilarating effect in “Neighbours”. Animation scholars disagree on whether the film counts as a proper animation, since a good deal of it was made using variable speed photography rather than stop-motion. But since the overall feeling created is artificial and anti-naturalistic – the characters levitate or glide across the grass – it feels closer to a cartoon than a short film.
An initially wry, ultimately disturbing parable about human hostility and barbarism, “Neighbours” resembles Laurel and Hardy slapstick scripted by Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of human society as “the war of all against all”. Two almost-identical men who live next door to each other get drawn into an increasingly ludicrous and catastrophic territorial struggle.
The film’s soundtrack was created by McLaren himself using a self-devised technique of “hand-drawn sound” that enabled precise synchronization of sonic and visual events. McLaren literally scored the film – scratching miniscule markings on the celluloid’s edge that controlled loudness, pitch and timbre. When the film was run through the projector, this miniature code-work generated electronic-sounding scurries of blips and squoinks.
If you fancy sampling out some of McLaren’s other flavours from across his long, varied career, try “Blinkity Blank” (brilliant scribbles directly engraved onto the film surface, then colored by hand, create an effect like mischievous fireworks), or “Pas De Deux,” a ballet fed through step-and-repeat printing to create a rippling trail of after-image clones of the dancers.