Lines Vertical
1960 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart
Genres: animation, experimental, musical
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Lines drawn directly on film move in precise patterns against shifting colours, accompanied by electronic piano music by Maurice Blackburn.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
McLaren and Lambart's direct-on-film approach should feel like gimmick, but instead it's pure cinema—no layers of irony, just geometric forms dancing to Blackburn's synth like they're solving a problem nobody asked. It's weird enough to matter, conventional enough that most people miss why.
A canonically essential meditation on animation as pure form, where the choice to bypass illustration entirely and work at the substrate level becomes a formal argument about what animation *is*—Blackburn's score seals it as a complete aesthetic object, not an experiment but a statement.
The single choice here is stripping away the animator's hand entirely; everything lives or dies on the rhythm Blackburn locks in and the color shifts that follow it, which means two artists working in completely different mediums had to achieve perfect synchrony with minimal safety net.