Norman Mclaren was one of the pioneers of Pixelation. My favourite film from McLaren is "Neighbours", not only is there quite a serious message hidden deep within, but it is most enjoyable to watch and extremely clever from an animators point of view.
The film follows two men which become enchanted in a sort of mystical manner about the sudden appearance of a flower. The flower projects a great amount of power, giving the men a "high" feeling from smelling it and being around it. The contextual information of the short film (released in 1952) tells me that there is an anti-nuclear war message within, the flower is an allegory for nuclear weapons and the power they possess stuns both the men in this haze of desire to own the biggest and best weapon on their craze for world domination. The fact the flower isn't actually a flower but a weed, could reflect the repugnant attitude Mclaren has towards the use of nuclear weapons and war in general, but also the wild, uncontrollable nature of the weapons themselves.
They end up fighting over who who should own the flower, like the fight to have the best weapons. They build a fence between them in another attempt to own the flower, this has connotations of the iron curtain.
The fight turns quite primal in nature, the ripping of clothes and pulling of each other, reflecting how the use of these weapons could revert us all back to this primal, stone-age way of living because there would be nothing left (If we were lucky enough to survive)....
It escalates even further to the point where they go and kill each others innocent civilians, reflecting the use of bombs in other countries leading to the loss of innocent life.
Finally, the fight ends with the death of them both, showing how with Nuclear weapons, no one wins.
You can't ignore Mclaren's sound effects, eerie and creepy in nature, which complements the austere message behind the film. And of course what gives his SFX the extra gravitas is how he makes them himself by drawing directly onto the sound track creating a form of 'visible' or synthetic sound, which is amazing to think about.
I really admire how serious and striking messages can be intertwined into a thought-provoking piece of moving image.
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