Oi Polloi

Worth a Watch: Neighbours by Norman McLaren

Published: Tue Dec 08 2015

Here’s another slab of madness-with-meaning from the National Film Board of Canada — it’s called Neighbours, it was made in 1952 by a man named Norman McLaren and it’s got nothing to do with Lou Carpenter and Jarrod ‘Toadfish’ Rebbechi.

Instead, Neighbours is an eight minute visual sherbet dib-dab featuring two neighbours duking it out over a flower that sprouts up between their houses, and if you enjoy a bit of slapstick (pretty violent slapstick, at that), then you’re in for a treat.

Audio-nerds might also be interested to hear that Norman made the soundtrack to this by scratching different shapes into the edge of the film itself.