Norman Mclaren and the Video Neighbours- My Thoughts

Norman Mclaren is a Scottish born Canadian animator and film director who was born on April 11th 1914. As it stands today he is most famous for the work he created for the National Film Board of Canada.

One of his most famous piece's is called Neighbors that was created in 1952 as an anti-war film that is rather oddly set two neighbors fighting over a flower that has grown in between both of their houses. It starts of rather innocently with them sharing a match for their respective pipe. It then takes its first step away from normality when a flower sprouts from the grass between their houses. This is the first example of stop motion as the actions of the plant are taken in the traditional way of picture by picture. The flower then proceeds to effect each of the neighbors by putting them into a euphoric state every time they sniff it. It then begins to make them fight over possession of the flower, by trying to decide whose side of the field is theirs they start drawing up lines of fencing using pixillation and some wooden planks. It then descends into mayhem as it then sparks a full out fight between them. As they fight their faces change in a form of pixillation as they revert back to primitive man for nothing more then a flower. The darkest part of this video is both of them in turn destroy each others houses and murder each others wife and child. This is all caused by one flower that has sprouted between their houses.

Obviously the idea is to be an anti-war film and to show how fighting over petty things is exactly what we did as neanderthals and that if we do fight we are no better then them. It is a very strong point that has been said by many philosophers over countless years and always with no avail.

The video won both the Canadian film award and an Academy award in the fields of short reel (one-reel)and best documentary (short subject). It was then said by a press release from AMPAS that it was "among a group of films that not only competed,but won academy awards in what were clearly inappropriate categories". Its clearly an interesting statement but it wouldn't have won an award if it didn't deserve one. I do think it deserved the award it got because it shows off how our human nature can effect our lives and make us become savages over the smallest of things.