MacPherson
2012 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Martine Chartrand
Genres: animation, biography, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
The friendship between young Félix Leclerc and Jamaican engineer Frank Randolph Macpherson, a jazz enthusiast who inspired Leclerc's song, is recounted in paint-on-glass animation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A biographical jazz appreciation film wrapped in paint-on-glass—it's the kind of respectful, heritage-minded project that should bore me, but Chartrand's refusal to sentimentalize the friendship or the medium itself keeps it from collapsing into nostalgia; there's a real tension there I didn't expect.
Chartrand's paint-on-glass technique sits deliberately within a lineage of NFB animation craft and humanist biography, and the film's restraint—letting the friendship breathe without manufactured drama—marks it as formally rigorous work that trusts its medium and its subject equally.
The decision to animate in paint-on-glass rather than rotoscope or digital could've been purely aesthetic, but Chartrand uses the translucency and layering of the technique to literally build the history between these two men, each frame accumulating like memory itself.