Animation Night in Canada, Vol. 1

Over decades, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has built a stable of world-class animators whose work has garnered much praise. Canadian International Pictures’ new Blu-ray collection, Animation Night in Canada, Vol. 1, focuses on 14 NFB efforts from 1965 to 1985 that earned nominations from the Academy Awards. The included selections are a mix of comic-strip satires, short stories both gentle and dark, beautiful abstractions, and experiments in form and content. 

The best-known animator here – and admittedly that distinction is relative – is the formally restless Norman McLaren. His Oscar-winning comedy Neighbours, which used stop-motion techniques to choreograph human actors (thus laying the groundwork for Peter Gabriel’s iconic “Sledgehammer” video), is relegated to the bonus features (see below). In the main program is his semi-abstract ballet film Pas de Deux, which utilizes optical printing to make his dancers appear to dance with themselves or to extrapolate their movements into geometrical shapes in the air. 

A variation on the Neighbours live-action/stop-motion hybrid can be seen in Monsieur Pointu, which feels like a vaudeville act meets the famous Looney Tunes short Duck Amuck. A fiddle player tries to play a folk song on stage but is repeatedly thwarted by reality – for thirteen minutes! 

There are two Oscar winners in the main program. The Sand Castle is a fanciful onslaught of sand creatures that slither and slink across a beach and around the screen. There’s a wistful quality to the film, due to the tenuous existence of these creatures; however, I am pretty certain I was introduced to this film as a kid and just enjoyed the weird-shaped characters and the way they interacted. Special Delivery meanwhile is a morbidly hilarious tale about a man trying to cover up the death of his mail carrier – caused by the man’s refusal to shovel his front steps – and the chaos that ensues. 

Dark humor and skepticism toward the modern world are frequently intertwined in the selections here. The Drag is essentially an anti-smoking PSA that takes a self-deprecating look at one man’s gradual addiction to cigarettes, with a pop art visual style. What on Earth! is a charming mockumentary purportedly from Mars, presenting data on Earth’s dominant life form: the automobile. (The sequence where the Martians imagine a car’s reproductive cycle is hilariously bizarre.) The House That Jack Built and Evolution both offer criticisms of society’s rat race and the evolution/de-evolution of modern civilization. Even The Bead Game, which uses thousands of colored beads to portray encounters between different creatures, presents life as a series of conflicts that rapidly escalate to nuclear apocalypse.

The start of nuclear war is also the punchline (sorta) in the absurdist comedy The Big Snit, which portrays a middle-aged couple pushed to the brink over a particularly annoying Scrabble game. A similarly dreary fate awaits The Family That Dwelt Apart, a twisted modern fairy tale from Charlotte’s Web writer E.B. White (who also narrates). 

None of these films are slouches in the realm of visual imagination, but arguably the remaining three shorts are the most sumptuous. Walking is a rhythmic study of people in motion, as rendered in multi-colored ink wash. The Street presents Mordecai Richler’s childhood memories of his dying grandmother in impressionistic globs of watercolor painted on glass. Paradise uses a mixed media approach to create an opulent palace which eventually inspires a brash bird to gate-crash. One might also wonder if Quentin Tarantino liked Paradise as a kid because the soundtrack heavily features Zamfir’s pan-flute version of “The Lonely Shepherd,” a recording also featured prominently in Kill Bill. 

I was surprised to realize while watching this collection that I had seen many of these films before. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I saw at least one in a school context, some I had seen as a kid in an animation collection on VHS from my public library, and some probably floated around cable back in the day. Whatever the case, this collection gave me a satisfying flush of nostalgia along with a newfound appreciation for the technical achievements and craft highlighted in each of these shorts. Animation fans will be mighty pleased with the selection and presentation.


Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
The standard edition of Animation Night in Canada, Vol. 1 comes to Blu-ray by way of Canadian International Pictures and OCN Distribution. The disc is packaged in a keepcase with a booklet featuring an interview with NFB’s Robert Verrall and notes on the included films. The disc loads to logos for CIP and the NFB before a full-motion menu featuring a clip from The Sand Castle appears. Like most discs authored under the auspices of OCN, the option to start from where you last played appears before the menu if this ain’t your first rodeo.

The packaging states that all films were restored by the NFB but no details about the restoration. Whatever the process, the films are consistently jaw-dropping in their clarity, richness of detail, and saturation of color. Pas de Deux is in black-and-white with deep, inky blacks and impressionistic high contrast, but when the camera gets in close, there are strong details in the mids and highlights. All the films are presented in a pillarboxed 1.33:1 aspect ratio. 

All 14 films are presented with DTS-HD MA 2.0 audio mixes. The films with dialogue are in English, and all the films come with one subtitle option: English SDH. The presentation here seems faithful to the original films. Some sound a bit boxy, which might just be era-related or due to budgetary constraints. Some of the more visually abstract films tend to have relatively more music- and ambience-driven design that are a little more layered and nuanced. This viewer found all of the audio mixes quite satisfying.

The main attraction of CIP's disc is the inclusion of eight additional shorts from filmmakers highlighted in the main program. Unfortunately, these shorts do not come with an English SDH option. (This Is Me has an English subtitles option because its original language is French. An English dub is also offered.) Two additional documentaries are included as well.

• Neighbours (HD, 8 mins.) - Norman McLaren's Oscar-winning comedy about two men fighting over a pretty flower.
• Boomsville (HD, 10 mins.) - Humanity ruins nature with its darn modernity again.
• Matrioska (HD, 5 mins.) - A Russian nesting doll attempts a dance number and almost pulls it off.
• The Underground Movie (HD, 14 mins.) - A crusty old scientist, his plucky daughter, and their dog drill to the center of the earth.
• Perspectre (HD, 6 mins.) - Squares of different colors shift and spin. This surely must have influenced the iTunes Visualizer.
• Canada Vignettes: Instant French (HD, 1 mins.) - A humorous fake ad for an electronic translator.
• Interview (HD, 14 mins.) - Caroline Leaf and Veronika Soul discuss and demonstrate their respective artistic processes.
• This Is Me (HD, 27 mins.) - The philosophical reflections of a bunch of pre-teens are presented and animated.
• McLaren on McLaren (HD, 8 mins.) - Norman McLaren talks about his work and his collaborators.
• Alter Egos (HD, 52 mins.) - An engrossing and sometimes uncomfortable doc about Walking director Ryan Larkin, plus animator Chris Landreth's attempt to make a computer animation short about their friendship. (Spoiler alert: He does, and it wins an Oscar.

It's no overstatement to say that this disc contains some of the finest animated shorts ever made. Some are beautiful, some are odd, some are both. Canadian International Pictures (CIP) continues to deliver great releases, and I hope that they get a chance to make good on delivering future volumes beyond this one. (By the way, whatever happened to The Other French New Wave, Vol. 2, eh?) Highly Recommended.