Neighbours

Canadian theatrical distributors were not too impressed when they were shown Neighbours in 1952. Most thought it of poor technical quality as well as gruesome. Most American distributors agreed, yet the film was picked up and shown theatrically stateside, leading to a surprising Academy Award for Best Short Documentary. The Oscar® led to theatrical showings around the world. Interestingly, the film was censored by an American educational distributor, who felt that the scenes of the women and babies being attacked were too much to show to children. It wasn’t until 15 years later that Norman McLaren would restore the film to its original version.

McLaren had been very intrigued by French trick films from the early 1900s in which everyday objects were animated frame by frame. He did some experimenting in his student films, and later he animated a household of furniture in a film for the General Post Office in London. He then wondered about the possibility of animating people frame by frame. This curiosity culminated in the extraordinary parable Neighbours, in which two men behave like cartoon characters in a tale both funny and ferocious. McLaren called the technique pixillation. The term is now universally misspelt as pixilation, which has an entirely different dictionary definition. McLaren made the term up from the word “pix,” an abbreviation for picture.