Neighbours (film)

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Neighbours is an Academy Award-winning 1952 short film, written and made by Scottish-Canadian filmmaker, Norman McLaren, and the National Film Board of Canada. It uses the technique known as pixilation, involving live actors and stop motion. 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.

This film has been designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada’s audio-visual heritage. [1]


Contents

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Two men (Jean Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro) live peacefully side by side in houses made of cardboard, but when a flower blooms between both their houses, they fight each other to the death over the ownership of the single small flower.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Controversy

Neighbours has garnered the label "one of the most controversial films the NFB ever made".[2] Further, the eight-minute film was politically motivated:

"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." — Norman McLaren [3]

However, the version of Neighbours that ultimately won an Oscar was not the version McLaren had originally created. In order to make the film palatable for American and European audiences, McLaren was required to remove a scene in which the two men, fighting over the flower, murdered the other's wife and children.[4]

While the film is considered a masterpiece of animation, it was not nominated in the Academy's "Short Subject (Cartoon) category. Instead, Neighbours was nominated twice, for Short Subject (One-reel) as well as Best Documentary (Short Subject). Strangely, it was in the Documentary category that this animated classic won its Oscar. A press release isued by AMPAS states that Neighbours is "among a group of films that not only competed, but won Academy Awards in what were clearly inappropriate categories." [5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://avtrust.ca/masterworks/2000/en_film.htm
  2. ^ McLaughlin, Dan (2001). A rather incomplete but still fascinating history of animation. Retrieved on 2006-08-30.
  3. ^ Norman McLaren. National Film Board of Canada. Retrieved on 2005-09-16.
  4. ^ Cartagena, Rene (2003). Neighbours. Retrieved on 2006-08-30.
  5. ^ http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2005/05.10.31.html

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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