Mail Early for Christmas
1959 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Norman McLaren
Genres: animation, experimental
Norman McLaren engraves images onto black film with an electric drill and hand-scratches brief lettering in a pre-Christmas reminder to mail early.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
McLaren takes a PSA—the most boring conceivable brief—and decides to hand-drill it into black film like he's performing surgery on the medium itself; the joke isn't the message, it's that he refuses to animate it normally, which is exactly the kind of 'why would you do it that way' move that makes something actually funny.
This sits in a precise lineage of McLaren's direct-on-film work and the avant-garde's playful relationship with utility; the scratched lettering and drilled imagery are formally rigorous gestures that transform a commercial obligation into genuine experimental cinema, proving that constraint and subversion can occupy the same frame.
The decision to use the drill as both tool and performance—letting the mechanical act itself become the animation—is so economical it borders on conceptual; one choice (don't draw it, carve it) takes a minute-long PSA and makes it unforgettable.