Hen Hop-McLaren Integral Version
1942 · 3m · Canada
Genres: animation, experimental
The unedited original version of Norman McLaren's cameraless animation shows a dancing hen transforming into an egg, drawn directly on 35 mm stock.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
McLaren drawing directly on film stock is exactly the kind of 'wait, you can DO that?' move that makes the medium itself the rebellion—but it's been canonized so hard that watching it now feels like visiting a museum rather than getting punched in the gut.
The integral version restores McLaren's uncompromised vision of cameraless animation as pure cinema, a foundational document that sits at the intersection of avant-garde technique and commercial animation history; it deserves the curatorial attention of an archive-aware reading.
The decision to animate directly on stock rather than use traditional cel work means every frame carries the artist's hand in a way no frame-by-frame process could—that tactile immediacy is the entire film, and it still holds.