The NFB's Site Is Netflix For People Like Me

The National Film Board of Canada's online archive of shorts should be better known.

Many countries offer some form of public funding to people making animation independently. France is unusually rich in this, which is one reason why its animation scene is so vibrant. Here in the UK, the British Film Institute operates the Short Form Animation Fund, and there are a few other relatively modest initiatives.

Canada is unusual. The federal government’s main way of supporting this sector is not by handing money to independent producers but by producing films itself at in-house studios, where directors receive direct creative and technical assistance.

The National Film Board of Canada is a curious institution: big enough to have received 78 Oscar nominations (and 12 wins), cult enough to have inspired the name of an electronica band, bureaucratic yet at times avant-garde. It has been going for almost a century, yet still it is little known among the wider filmgoing public, given its achievements and the sheer size of its catalogue. Surely this is linked to its decision to focus on animation and documentary, two categories often given short shrift when it comes to discussing, distributing and screening films.

The NFB’s animation department was founded by the Scottish animator and filmmaker Norman McLaren, who went on to make an array of relentlessly interesting films there. (I told you I’d be talking about him lots.) He has cast a long shadow. Not in the sense that subsequent filmmakers copied his style—quite the opposite: his experimental spirit set the tone for the department’s approach to animation. In the decades since, the NFB has consistently worked with some of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic filmmakers around.

Norman McLaren in his film Opening Speech: McLaren (1961).

To those who know how hard it is to fund animated shorts, the continued existence of a body like the NFB seems utopian. Complaints from filmmakers of administrative bloat and declining budgets offer a useful corrective; there’s a sense of precarity there too. Still, it is a precious institution that gives filmmakers an unusual amount of protection from the marketplace.

The NFB is required to make its films as accessible as possible to the Canadian taxpayers who bankroll them. A product of this is a vast online archive of its films, which for the most part can be watched anywhere in the world. This is basically Netflix for people like me, except free. It should be better known.

With that in mind, I’ve selected five of my favourite animated films on the platform. Those that also exist on YouTube are embedded here; otherwise, I’ve linked through to the NFB’s site.

Fine Feathers (Evelyn Lambart, 1968)

Like her close collaborator Norman McLaren, Lambart was a genuine pioneer: “The first female animation filmmaker” in Canada, according to the NFB. The pair made several groundbreaking films that helped shape the direction of the organisation’s animation department, but she was also a brilliantly imaginative artist in her own right. From the 1960s, her shorts were populated with strange cut-out birds (later joined by frogs and mice and others). Watching the films, I feel as though I’m back in a childhood fever dream where innocuous things take on a piercing vividness. Perhaps it’s her colours, which shine fierce against the black backdrops, or the intense eyes, or the slightly troubling way in which the characters’ body parts are disconnected. I find these films so beautiful and could recommend any. Fine Feathers is a fine example.

The Hat (Michèle Cournoyer, 1999)

Cournoyer is a master of the morph. In her later films, her stark ink lines are forever shifting as one form gives way to another. Metamorphosis is a type of editing peculiar to animation, which suggests a kind of identity—a common substance—between sometimes very different things. The veteran Canadian animator deploys this to disquieting effect in The Hat: images of a young girl and of a scantily clad dancer in a bar flow into each other, the rhythm mirroring the way memories slip into and out of our awareness. Gradually, a story of childhood abuse takes shape. This is a frightening film that works its power quickly.

Bob’s Birthday (Alison Snowden/David Fine, 1993)

A British dentist slides into a mid-life crisis, losing his trousers (and possibly his mates), in this Oscar-winning short. I’m including it for three reasons. First, it’s a laugh. Second, it shows that NFB animation isn’t all experimental—the organisation also produces conventionally narrative, even mainstream shorts. Third, because it’s an example of a very important facet of NFB activity: co-production. Bob’s Birthday was made with the UK’s Channel 4—once a world leader in short-form animation, believe it or not—which initiated the project. The film spawned a series, Bob & Margaret, which is about the closest UK television has come to finding its own Simpsons.¹ The NFB wasn’t involved, its remit at the time being limited to shorts (though it has since branched out into series in select cases).

Watch the film here.

Mindscape (Jacques Drouin, 1976)

No technique is more closely identified with the NFB than the pinscreen. Invented by animator duo Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker in the 1930s, the tool consists of a board studded with hundreds of thousands of sliding pins; when lit from the side, they create an intricate mesh of light and shadow that forms an image. The NFB supported the duo’s work early on, and the esoteric knowledge of how to work the pinscreen has been passed down between generations of its filmmakers ever since. Drouin mastered the tool, and he deploys it beautifully in this haunting reverie, in which a man paints a landscape that turns into a map of his subconscious. The delicate play of shading and texture is a tribute to the capabilities of the pinscreen, and to Drouin’s sensitive touch.

Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004)

In the early 1970s, Ryan Larkin was a brilliant young animation filmmaker with several NFB shorts and an Oscar nomination to his name. Three decades later, he was panhandling on the streets of Montreal, his life ravaged by homelessness and substance misuse. It was around this time that Landreth interviewed him for what became this striking animated documentary, co-produced by the NFB. For characters, Landreth tends to use distorted, deconstructed CG models whose outward deformities speak of inner trouble. This technique is in full evidence here. What I like about Ryan is that it is interested in its subject primarily as an artist suffering from serious creative trouble; it does not pry voyeuristically into the details of his psychological decline. Larkin’s films, excerpted in Ryan, can also be watched on the NFB’s site, as can a 52-minute documentary about him and Landreth.

If you’ve reach this far and are hungry for more, here are a few other NFB directors whose work I’d urge you to check out: Caroline Leaf, Matthew Rankin, Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, Lori Malépart-Traversy, Paul Driessen, Clorinda Warny, and of course the big papa himself: Norman McLaren.

1. In The Story of British Animation, Jez Stewart devotes an interesting column to British animation producers’ largely fruitless quest to create a local hit to match The Simpsons.