Review: Neighbours by Norman McLaren

Norman McLaren was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada. He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including drawn on film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound.
Norman received many awards throughout his career, including an Oscar for the Best Documentary in 1952 for Neighbours.

Neighbours is an 8 minute short film which was inspired by the Korean War. McLaren wanted to make a strong film against militarism and war. A quote from the director, Norman, "I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao's revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. (...) I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war.'' 

The short-film begins with two cardboard houses sliding in from each side of the frame, followed by two deck chairs appearing from the houses and sliding forward to the camera. Two men then appear sitting on the deck chairs, and begin smoking a cigar and reading newspapers. The two men are then surprised to see one single flower appear from the ground, in between the two cardboard houses. The individually begin to smell the flower, and moving each other out of the way so they can smell it for longer. They began attempting to line off which side the flower was on, and had many disagreements doing this. There is then a fight between the two men for the remainder of the video. The film ends with the two men beating each other to the point in which they both die, and two graves appear. They are buried, in which brings up two flowers, one for each man, in the scene as they sit on top of the grave.

I think this video is hard to understand if you didn't know the story behind as to why Norman McLaren made it. The video is supposed to send a message to people that war is so easily escalated in the depths of people killing innocent people of a different culture. The sequence in which the women and babies are attacked was removed by an American educational distributor who felt it was too violent. The NFB Blog states that 'Norman McLaren was originally upset because he felt cutting the film would ruin the effect of the soundtrack. He was later impressed by the shortened version and decided to leave it as it is, and this because the official finishing print, distributed by the NFB for years to come.'

In my opinion, the concept of this video is very clever, as it is indirectly trying to tell people how serious and life threatening war is. I really like how this film was put together and the idea of using small frames was really clever, as it looks funky and very professional. 

Cheerio. :o)

- Olivia.

http://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2011/02/27/neighbours-the-nfbs-second-oscar-winner/ - accessed on 18-Sept-2013