Neighbours - Norman McLaren.

Neighbors.



Neighbors is a 1952 anti-war film by Scottish-Canadian film maker Norman McLaren. Produced at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, the film used the technique known as Pixilation, an animation technique using live actors as stop-motion objects. McLaren created the soundtrack of the film by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines and triangles which the projector read as sound.
The main plot of the story is about two men, Jean-Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro. They live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a flower blooms between their houses, they fight each other to death over  the ownership of the single small flower.

Norman McLaren's short animation film "Neighbours" is a dramatic and yet an amusing, humorous piece. From the first frame, it's hard not to notice McLaren's distinctive style of work. With this piece, he uses a combination of live action, animation and special effects. The remarkable technique of stop motion animation is what gives this piece a humorous touch to the topic of violent behaviour. The fight between the pair starts over a single bloomed flower placed between each of their houses, with each of them trying to be the owner of it eventually. The special effects used in this particular piece are fantastic, especially one scene where the two men appear to be levitating. This particular effect is achieved with the stop motion technique where the live actors are required to continuously jump whilst the creator continues to take photographs until the desired effect is achieved. I thought the setting/location was perfect for this particular piece, you can tell this short animation was created during the war by just the old effect the creator has tried to use such as the way the two men dress, the cardboard houses and their chairs, I don't think any other location would have fitted with this piece. The soundtrack is very effective for this animation. McLaren created it by scratching the edge of the film to create various blobs, lines and triangles which flow with the actors' movements throughout the film. I wouldn't say there were any camera angles in this animation as it's stop motion, I'm not to sure about that.

Norman McLaren - Neighbours.