Two men, Jean-Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro, live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a single, small flower blooms between their houses, they fight each other to the death over ownership of that flower. The moral of the film is, simply, Love your neighbour. The moral is also shown in other languages, including:
Neighbours has been described as "one of the most controversial films the NFB ever made". The eight-minute film was politically motivated:
"I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao's revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war." — Norman McLaren
The version of Neighbours that ultimately won an Oscar was not the version McLaren had originally created. In order to make the film palatable for American and European audiences, McLaren was required to remove a scene in which the two men, fighting over the flower, murdered the other's wife and children. During the Vietnam War, public opinion changed, and McLaren was asked to reinstate the sequence. The original negative of that scene had been destroyed, so the scene was salvaged from a positive print of lower quality. NFB founder John Grierson, who had invited McLaren to the NFB to form its first animation unit, would ultimately disparage Neighbours and McLaren's attempt at political cinema:
"I wouldn't trust Norman around the corner as a political thinker. I wouldn't trust Norman around the corner as a philosophic thinker. That's not what Norman is for. Norman is for Hen Hop. Hen Hop. That's wonderful. And so many other things. That's his basic gift. He's got joy in his movement. He's got loveliness in his movement. He's got fancy in his changes. That's enough"
Pixilation
The term 'pixilation' was created by Grant Munro, who had worked with McLaren on Two Bagatelles, a pair of short pixilation films made prior to Neighbours. While Neighbours is often credited as an animated film by many film historians, very little of the film is actually animated. The majority of the film is shot with variable-speed photography, usually in fast motion, with some stop-frame techniques. During one brief sequence, the two actors appear to levitate: this effect was actually achieved in stop-motion; the men repeatedly jumped upward but were photographed only at the top of their trajectories. Under the current definition of an animated short, it is unlikely that Neighbours would qualify as either a documentary short or an animated short. McLaren followed Neighbours with two other films using a similar combination of pixilation, live action, variable speed photography and string puppets. The first, A Chairy Tale was a collaboration with Claude Jutra and Ravi Shankar. The second, Opening Speech by Norman McLaren was made for the International Film Festival of Montreal, and starred McLaren himself. Wolf Koenig served as cameraman on the film.
Awards and honours
Neighbours is the winner of both a Canadian Film Award and an Oscar. For the latter, it was nominated twice in the 25th Academy Awards, for Short Subject and for Best Documentary. It was in the Documentary category that this short, stylized drama won its Oscar. A press release issued by AMPAS states that Neighbours is "among a group of films that not only competed, but won Academy Awards in what were clearly inappropriate categories". This film was designated as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada's audio-visual heritage. In 2009, Neighbours was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme, listing the most significant documentary heritage collections in the world.
