Korean Alphabet
1967 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Kim In Tae
Genres: animation, documentary, family
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
Letters of the Korean alphabet come alive through colourful graphics by Kim In Tae and synthetic sound by Norman McLaren in a short made to teach children the script.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A children's alphabet film sounds like the safest possible commission, but McLaren's synthetic sound design actively *refuses* to be cute—it's genuinely alien, which means Kim In Tae's geometric letterforms stop being pedagogical and start being an argument about what animation can do when it stops trying to please.
This is the work of two masters operating at the intersection of experimental animation and applied design; McLaren's pioneering synth score with Kim's rigorous graphic vocabulary creates a template that Canadian and Korean animation schools would echo for decades—it's a teaching film that teaches through formal innovation rather than narrative concession.
The singular choice here is letting the *sound* do the primary expressive work while the letters stay graphically austere; most educational shorts would have smothered this in character animation and voice-over, but the decision to let McLaren's synthetic tones carry the emotional weight means every geometric transformation reads as a discovery rather than a lesson.