Two Views of Movement

The McLaren–Oshii divide.

A still from La Poulette Grise (1947)

Welcome! We’re back with another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one’s about clashing philosophies.

Chances are you’ve heard the words before. Norman McLaren wrote them in the mid-century, and they spread around the world during the ‘50s and ‘60s. They’re still hard to avoid: even people who aren’t McLaren fans reference them.

They were his attempt to sum up the animation medium in a few poetic sentences. As he put it:

• Animation is not the art of drawings-that-move but the art of movements-that-are-drawn.

• What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame.

• Animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames.¹

Many have wrestled with this definition over the years. It’s a little koan-like. Still, it has a meaning. What’s not well known is that McLaren was drawing a line here: trends that bothered him were rising in animation, and he put forward his ideas in response. For him, these were the rules of animation — and work he disliked was breaking them.