Films that have screened at the Yorkton Film Festival have also gone on to win much bigger awards, and in film there are few films bigger than the Oscars. This has been the case from the beginning, and not long after the festival itself started, 1952’s Neighbours, produced for the NFB by Norman McLaren, was nominated for awards from both the YFF and the Academy Awards.
A fairly simple war allegory, we have two neighbours who live in peace until a nice smelling - and possibly drug-laced, given their reactions - flower pops up at the border of their two properties. They fight over it and, eventually, destroy themselves over it. But this is not a film about plot, it’s a film about its own visuals.
Animation often puts bodies in motion and moves things around in ways that live action cannot. Live action is governed by boring things like the laws of physics, which keep things grounded in reality. McLaren does something unique, making a film that is essentially live action animation. The actors are real people, but by using stop-motion animation they move in completely unnatural ways. They float around the space, they grow slowly grotesque and they move in ways that real things simply can’t. One can marvel at just how this was accomplished, the fluidity of the floating scenes seems almost impossible to maintain - especially as McLaren shot it in direct sunlight outdoors. That choice leads to very prominent shadows that make it difficult to hide mistakes - so difficult, in fact, that there are scenes where an errant crew member makes shadows at the edge of the frame.
It feels like something from the Looney Tunes collection, absurd violence and inventive visual gags driving what is a very simple story. It’s doing that in the real world, animating with reality, blurring the edges between what’s real and what is animated. The big innovation is that it pushes the boundaries of how a film can look, combining forms to make something that looks completely absurd.
It has to look absurd, that’s the point of the film. If we are trying to make a film about the absurdity of human conflict, it only strengthens the point when the film itself just looks ridiculous. Small touches like having the flower cover itself, as though it can’t watch, that’s the kind of thing that a film like this needs, it keeps it looking unreal and underlines the point that this entire conflict is, well, silly.
Taking something serious and making it silly is a classic move, and like the Looney Tunes itself, turning murder into a joke is a way to emphasize how petty the conflict actually is.
Neighbours went on to win Best Documentary, Short Subject at the Academy Awards. It’s both fictional and largely animated, so you would assume that it was entered in the wrong category, but maybe the definition of documentary was different that year. I would argue that an Academy Award was deserved, but in the other category where it was nominated, Best Live Action Short Film, One Reel. It’s not completely live action either, but that’s much closer than documentary.
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