Spheres
1969 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Norman McLaren, René Jodoin
Genres: animation, experimental, musical
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Translucent, pearl-like spheres drift across a shifting coloured sky, gathering, separating, and colliding in a wordless dance choreographed to Bach performed by pianist Glenn Gould.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
McLaren and Jodoin could've coasted on abstract prettiness, but instead they let those spheres *mean* something—collision as conversation, drift as argument—without a single word apologizing for it; most animators would've buried this under narrative scaffolding, and they knew better.
A masterwork of restraint and formal clarity: the marriage of geometric abstraction to Bach's precision establishes a lineage from absolute animation through to everything that followed, and Gould's interpretation becomes the film's invisible architecture—this is what happens when technique and tradition speak the same language.
The decision to let Glenn Gould's tempo variations *choreograph* the sphere movements instead of forcing animation to a click track transforms what could've been a mechanical exercise into something breathing—it's the kind of counter-intuitive choice that proves constraint is where real invention lives.