User:Animatrick

Contents

• The Establishment of the National Film Board * The NFB Logo * Animation * Significant Dates and Events * Oscar Won by the NFB * McLaren’s Filmography

The Establishment of the National Film Board

The National Film Board of Canada is a unique cultural, set apart from most other production houses by its mandate. Established on May 2, 1939, by an act of parliment, the National Film Board of Canada is founded by the Canadian goverment. The process had begun in 1936 and was not fully concluded until 1949. The Film Board was born in a five-year struggle between inertia and purposes, or between routine and charisma. John Grierson, a pioneer documentary filmmaker and visionary, founded the National Film Board of Canada and was the first Goverment Film Commissioner.He was born in 1898 in Scotland, the son of the headmaster of a village school. After WW1 he went to Glasgow University, graduating M.A .in philosophy in 1923. From 1924 to 1927 he was in the U.S. on a Rockefeller Research Fellowship in social science, studying at Chicago, Wisconsin, and Columbia Universities. He made a study of the development of newspaper and film media. Before returning to England, Grierson had two experiences which were to shape his thinking and his career. He helped prepare Eisenstein’s Battelship for American release, and he met Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North he had seen several years earlier in Scotland. These two great directors represented opposite poles in their respective approaches to filmmaking. As the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens recalled, Grierson would quote the Bible to a Communist and Lenin to Catholic.

In 1928 he returned to England and organized the E.M.B Film Unit, first as director and later as producer. The purpose of this group of film-makers was to "bring alive" in terms of cinema some of the essential but taken-for-granted phases of modern life. When the E.M.B. was dissolved in 1934, the Post Office took over the running of the film unit and Grierson became head of the new G.P.O. Film Unit. In 1935, he founded Film Center in London.Between 1930 and 1938 he was directly or indirectly responsible for the production of a long list of documentaries on behalf of the British Goverment. In the same period he also founded and published World Film News. On the invitation of the Canadian Goverment, he came to canada in 1938 to survey and report upon filmwork and possibilities in this country, and helped to draft the National Film Act of 1939.

The next four years were a time of phenomenal expansion for the Film Board. In October 1941, four month after the absorption of the MPB , there were fifty-five people on the staff. By december 1942, there were 293. By January 1944, there were 458. In 1945, the number of staff reached a peak of 787.during the war, the film Board produced approximately five hundred films. By the end of the war, a single series, World In Action, was reaching a monthly audience of 30 million in twenty-one countries. One thing is certain, by the nineteen-forties, Grierson had drifted far from his early line of thinking. He had always called himself a "propagandist first and filmmaker second, " and his aesthetic was always action-oriented. In 1945, Grierson stepped down from the NFB to take on the job of Director of UNESCO’s Mass Communications (1946-1948) in Paris. Later he became Controller of Films at the Central Office of Information in London (1948-1950). Then, in 1951, together with John Baxter , he took charge of the National Film Finance Coporation’s Group 3, designed to develop the talents of young feature film-makers and actors. There he influenced such talents as Kenneth More, Peter Finch, and Peter sellers. His dream was to make the National Film Board "the eyes of Canada" and to ensure that it would "through a national use of cinema, see Canada and see it whole: its people and its purpose."Grierson died on February 19, 1972, in Bath, England at theage of 73. The NFB Logo

The idea was mooted in 1965, it was not until early 1967 that the board of governors hired two graphics firms to come up with an appropriate corporate symbol. When their submissions had proved unsatisfactory, McPherson ordered a competition within the Film Board. Some fifty-three graphics designs were submitted, identified by number only, and after a further sifting process, the three finalists’ logos were: Georges Beaupre’s "Man Seeing" was the winner, Norman MCLaren’s dazzling 3-D Möbius film loop and Sidney Goldsmith’s abstract seeing-eye came in second and third place. McPherson descibed the logo as a figure representing mankind, with echos of the Eskimos and Indian cultures that were part of Canada’s community. Its colors of green and blue are life colors, and the raised arms with clasped hands suggest celebration. The head, like the iris of an eye, symbolizes visionary man, animated man, and possibly even man mis a nu . From 1970, this symbol has preceded every film Board production. In 1978 director Michael Rubbo complained that the logo was depressing: the Film Board then decided to animate it. In 1986 Ishu Patel’s colourfully animated " Man Seeing " became the standard that adorns each film. Animation

McLaren Founded the Animation unit in 1942, and within a decade had recruited such original animators as "Colin Low, Wolf Koenig, Robert Verrall, Evelyn Lambert, George Dunning, Rene Jodoin, Grant Munro, James Mackay, and Jean-Paul Ladouceur". These innovative artists became the leadership core that propelled the institution for the next forty years.

McLaren was born in 1914 in Scotland. The young Norman McLaren intended to specialize in set design when he entered the Glasgow School of Fine Arts in 1932. He joined the Glasgow Film Society and discoverd motion pictures through the masterpieces of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Fischinger. McLaren began his filmmaking career in 1934, and the following year, two of his films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where John Grierson was one of the members of the jury. Impressed with the young filmmaker’s talent, Grierson offered him a job at the General Post Office Film Unit in London. In 1936 McLaren worked as a cameraman in Spain during the Civil War, an experience that haunted him for many years. When he felt that war in Europe was imminent, he decided to emigrate to the United State, and settled in New York in 1939. In 1941, at the invitation of john Grierson, McLaren joined the National Film Board, Grierson had recruited McLaren with the promise that he would not be asked to do Propaganda films, but soon after his arrival in Ottawa McLaren was applying his experimental genius to such badly utilitarian purposes as publicizing war saving (V for Victory), urging people to buy war bonds ( Hen Hop and Five for Four), moving the mail ( Mail Early for Christmas) and fighting inflation ( Dollar Dance ) . In 1943, MacLaren took on the responsibility of supervising and developing the Film Board’s animation department. In 1944 under Norman McLaren ’s supervision, a series of animated sing-along films, Chants Populaires, was produced. These were film adoptions of French-Canadian folk songs. The Film Board, and perhaps Grierson himself, assumed that French-Canadians, wanted the same things as the English-Canadians did: Victory in Europe, unity in Canada, and economic progress. The unity, or wholeness, that Grierson promoted did not apply to Quebec in the way it did to English-Canada. In Practice, Grierson had modified the 1939 mandate of helping " Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts""such that the " other parts " included only superficial reference to Quebec. For the first two years of the war, French-Canadian production consisted solely in making French-Languge sound tracks for English-Canadians films. The French-Canadians had a slogan to the effect that " the version is better than the original".

In 1949, McLaren and Evelyn Lambert had experimented with painting images on film to accompany the brilliant jazz score of Oscar Peterson in Begone Dull Care , which became one of the most enduring Film Board productions. The same year, McLaren joined UNESCO in China, where, as part of a project on fundamental education, he taught a group of Chinese artists simple animation and filmstrip techniques, to be used to teach rural populations the principles of health and sanitation He witnessed the Communist takeover, and was impressed by the excitement and enthusiasm of the young people around him. He developed an empathy for them and when he returned to Canada in 1950 felt like " a very socially aware animal " distressed as he was by the Korean war. He intended to do " serious" pieces, but could not resist Raymod Spottiswoode ’s invitation to make two stereoscopic (3-D) items for the festival of Britain, "Now Is the Time and Around Is Around". Upon returning to the Film Board, he and Grant Munro began testing a new method for animating. Instead of having the camera record twenty-four frames per second, they could slow down the number to as little as one frame a second. The results, called pixilation, showed odd, stylized, capricious, and impossible behaviour. In 1952, McLaren made Neighbours, an eight- minute film with pacifist theme. As he explained it years later, the Korean war had its impact on the concept too. With Canada on one side and chinese on the other, ` I felt very strongly the effect of war on two good people who were fighting each other, and this intensity of feeling about war made me make Neighbours. When the film won an Academy Award in 1953, McLaren was on another UNESCO project this time in India. A brief telegram heralded, "Congratulations. Neighbours wins Oscar." McLaren replied that he was pleased with the news, but wondered quizzically why this called for a costly telegram about someone called Oscar. After Neighbours , McLaren didnot make another film so urgent a theme. His work became more abstract. McLaren, however, was a " loner "" in his art. Although quite capable of working with others and generous with his talent, he really didn’t need others. Yet, in the development of animation in the late forties and early fifties, " McLaren’s presence as a great artist, "" Low remembers, " was not inconsequential. " His abstract work inspired an attempt to develop the cartoon form of animation, which, as it existed in Hollywood and elsewhere at the time, was too expensive for the Film Board. But cartoon animation necessairly involved a partial break from McLaren’s approach. Low comments that " cartoon animation demands a very close team collaboration. It is essential. " And it was in 1953, on a cartoon film, The Romance of Transportation in Canada, that Low, Koenig, Kroiter, and Daly collaborated for the first time as a team.. In 1957 McLaren Finished a new experimental pixilation work with Claude Jutra and Evelyn Lambert, the languageless fable, A Chairy Tale. It was the fantastic story of a man (Jutra) who found a chair with a mind of its own, unwilling to accommodate him until he proved that kindness and understanding achive more than a will to overpower. Typically, McLaren completed it for half the $22,000 budget. When French film maker Rene Clair visited Montral late in 1958 , McLaren gave him a copy, and Clair’s unsolicited praise for the instituation as "une chose absolument unique au monde", which used cinema as an instrument of artistic creation, was wonderful for moral. Besides being nominated for an Oscar and taking first place in the experimental category at Venice, A Chairy Tale endured to become one of the Film Board’s most popular nontheatrical films worldwide. In 1960 at the height of the Unit B’s success, and well before the full emergence of the Vitnam War, McLaren expressed regret that he had not done more films with a larger social purpose than his experimental work after Neighbours, and he suggested that perhaps it is more important at the moment for a creative artist to turn his mind to the problems that are menacing our contemporary society, if he is at all inclined by instinct and temperament to do so. At a time when our whole civilization is in danger of being destroyed, we are perhaps finding away our energy on a host of pretty and beautiful things which the world has a surfeit of already.

The key personnel in Unit B were (besides Norman McLaren, who was an entity on his own)Wolf Koenig , Colin Low, Roman Kroiter, and Stanley Jakson. Eldon Rathburn almost always composed the music. Koenig joined the institution in 1946, served as cameraman on Neighbours, City of Gold, and Corral, and was animator on The Romance of Transportationin Canada. He then pioneered The Candid Eye series with Roman Kroitor. Colin Law, joined the Film Board as an animator in 1945, and following Corral, his first live-action film in 1954, probably did more to shape various documentry-film styles than any other person at the institution. Low also pioneered animation techniques in Universe. He has developed and introduced the most refined 3-D process in the world, and he continues to work on research and development of that medium for application to the giant-screen IMAX system.

In City of Gold 1952 Kroitor developed " Kroitorer " a machine that enabled one to shoot the photographs as if a hand-held camera had been there at the time. In essence, his device achieved what the computer-assisted animation camera would do when it was invented a dozen years later.

North America was experiencing a simultaneous confluence of social and political radicalism, as ` what to do about youth? ‘ had become the parental puzzle of the sixties. In the United States, the Kennedy administration’s creation of the peace Corps and its demostic version under President Johnson, VISTA ( Volunteers in Service to America ), followed by the job Corps training of unemployed youths, had been public-relations successes. These programmes were a most effective means of channeling the energies of a postwar generation just comig of age, as the United States sidled unintentionally into an Asian conflict in a country that over half the population had never heard of, Vietnam. When President Johnson launched his, `war on poverty ‘ in the summer of 1964, Canada had begun to mirror much of the same American social rhetoric. The Film Board had also manifested radical tendencies. The 1964 restructuring of English programming and introduction of the ` pool’ system had ushered in a period of experimentation in which filmmakers made use of new creative freedoms. Some believed that the auteur’s role was to experiment with the medium and to be original. They argued that the artist’s licence was to explore personal aesthetics, and to not be bound by such deal weight as traditional rigorous standards. A number of filmmakers were making fresh and engaging films that fell into this category. In 1966 Derek May’s seven-minute short Angel demonstrated the fascinating uses of high -contrast images in a fantasy, with poetry by Leonard Cohen. A year later, Norman McLaren’s Oscar-nominated "Pas de deux " contained his most technically accomplished work yet, a study in multiple images of the complex choreography of ballet. His innovation of exposing the same frame as many as ten times was soon copied by the world of advertising. In 1971, the Studio System was adopted, but the studios proved to be larger that expected. This was partly to save money, because each studio needed its own budget officer and other administration staff. Perhaps it was also partly because in the atomsphere of distrust, management could identify few filmmakers or producers to whom it would entrust a studio. At any rate, in the words of one producers, the system " is somewhat pseudo-just a collection of idividuals grouped under executive producers. " Intended as a Unit system without the flaws of the old Unit System, the studio System was more like a hybrid of the Unit System and the Pool System. But whether it possessed hybrid vigour or not has remained an open question. Both the English and French Animation studios managed to excel during this period as they created exquisite works of art. In 1971, Laurent Coderre’s Zikkaron won the grand prize for technique at Cannes for its novel use of cut-out animation to describe in five minutes the entire cycle of human life. Norman McLaren’s Ballet Adagio of that same year was an outstanding 10 minute slow-motion study of the languor and fluidity of classical ballet, which contrasted nicely with Street Music, Ryan Larkin’s visual improvisation on music as performance in 1972. In 1973 Norman McLaren had made the documentary Pinscreen, which had demonstrated Alex andre Alexeieff’s pinboard technique of film animation. The timeless parable Balablol, by Czech animator Bretislav Pojar, told the wordless story of human sruggle in 8 minute masterpiece. Using animated cut-outs, Pojar reduced the human comedy to opposition between cubes and balls, who exhaust themselves in pointless battle until resolution is find by combining in love to produce triangles. Whether or not this a simplistic answer to the human propensity to violence, the portrayal allows people to view objectively what Earth might look like to visitors from another planet. Once the technical means to project moving images into deep space is achieved, this film would be a good candidate to send to the galaxies to inform other intelligent life of what civilization is likely to be found among Homo sapiens. Balablok won the Palme d’ Or at Cannes in 1974. Also in 1974, the 13 minute animated cartoon done for information Canada, Propaganda Message, directed by Barrie Nelson, allowed the comic genius of Don Arioli to gush on to the screen in an irreverent glance at the complexity of Canadian society, where there as many problems and solutions as individuals. In the scenario, the two founding peoples are likened to cats and dogs. Each animal, anxious for harmony, tries to teach the other how to bark and meow respectvely an apt description of the frustration and comedy of national accommodation. It is hard to imagine any other goverment in the world paying for a commercial on national unity, which by refusing to take its task seriously achieves the desired effect. Arioli, Kroitor, Koenig, and Verral made up the storyboard on the train between Montreal and Ottawa as they were en route to "sell" the project to Information Canada. Zlatko Grgic and Arioli collaborated in a 1971 9-minute animation, Hof Stuff, a riotously funny sponsored film that demonstrates the human propensity to play with and be careless about fire, from its discovery to the present. Concern about fire hazards motivates the chauvinistic caveman Adam to tell Eve to tend to her apple turnovers, while the lack of concern by a contemporary television-bound lazy husband is responsible for setting his house on fire, despite his side-kick-cat’s hilarious attempts to warn him.

One of the most original animation films was the computer-assisted Hunger / La faim, by Peter Foldes, completed in 1973, two years after his first experiment in the genre, Metadata. This 11-minute contemporary parable is about the inextinguishable and insatiable desire that springs from contemporary alienation. A man’s once-sparing appetite is gratified perpetually, resulting in a miasma of gluttony and greed, which themseleves lead to his being devoured by a hungry world. Hunger is not only a warning to the nations of the modern industrialized world, it is also a prophecy in an age that worships individual gain and pays gruding Lip-service to social consciousness. Hunger, which won thirteen awards, including one at cannes, heralded the future trend toward computer assisted animation, which today is a dominant tool in animation art. On a less sombre note the same year, E.B. White’s wry New England tale `The Family That Dwelt Apart’ lent itself well to the animation skills of Yvon Mallette. The 8-minute cartoon animation recounts White’s tale of an island-dwelling family that attracts help it does not need from sensation-seeking media, with sad and tragic results for all concerned. The fact that one thing leads to another and to dire consequences is also the theme of Cat’s Cradle, directed by Paul Driessen in 1974.Ten minutes of his Gothic characters’ cel animated eeriness send a chill down a viewer’s spine, as one realizes the interchangeability of big and small, good and bad, and the ultimate neutrality of colour, or lack of it. In 1975 Veronika Soul’s montage of animated photographs superimposed on actuality film footage told the story of Tax: The Outcome of Income. The thesis is that one way to gauge historical time is by the numerous means goverments have used to co-opt citizens’ revenue. Her glimpse at Canada’s modernized tax system shows just how original a sponsored film can be when the filmmaker is inspired. From this brief survey, it is evident that animation had become one of the pillars of the institution, and in 1974 directors Rupert Glover and Michel Patenaude made The Light Fantastick to show how and why that was so. In this documentry, well known animators described various technique they employed over the decades to creat their world-class production. The documentary, which include clips of some of the best animations, won three international awards.

One of the most popular and celebrated films of 1976 was the animated tale by Caroline Leaf, The Street, based on the short story by Mordecai Richler. While dealing with the timeless theme of aging, infirmity, and death as seen through the innocent eyes of children, the animation also exudes the warmth and sometimes self-deprecating humour of first-generation Jewish urbanties. Leaf’s animation technique of continually changing washes of water-color and ink on glass plate created an almost cryptic rhythm of object-blending-into-object, beyond the earthbound rules of fixed observation. The Street won an Oscar nomination and accumulated ninteen awards.

In 1977, there were other productions that earned prestigious Oscar nominations. One was , Bead Game, by Ishu Patel, uses thousands of beads to create scores of animated objects that change constantly into colorful and wondrous creations, devouring each other with no seeming purposes. Perhaps a five-minute version of Darwinism. Bead Game’s open-endedness makes it universally facinating and appealing.

Dutch-born animator Co Hoedeman, motivated by his children building a sand castle at beach, conceived the Oscar winner The Sand Castle, a fable with a more specific storyline. Using the medium of sand and sand-covered foam-rubber puppets, he brought to life a cavorting Sandman, who becomes the visionary and creator of other functional sand creatures. To the sound of happy music and guffaws, they construct a grandiose castle under his inspiration and, like all civilizations, watch time and wind erode, then destroy, their enterprise. It is easy for both the child and adult viewer to assign meaning to this 13-minute fable, where nothing remains but spirit and memory. The Sand Castle won a total of twenty-two awards worldwide, the greatest number in filmboard history.

In 1978, the Oscar winner for best animated short was Special Delivery, a wacky, off-the-wall piece by Eunice Macaulay and John Weldon. The zany story of Ralph and Alice was modelled on typical soap-opera fare. It begins with Ralph’s failure to shovel snow from his walk and ends with an accidentally dead mailman, an unfaithful wife who abandons home and town, and Ralph resigned ( like many Canadians) to accept whatever fate has in store, since Life is much bigger than all mortal forces. In short , existence is better accepted than fought. If this 7-minute paper animation is a parable about the meek, weak, and torpid, Canadians loved it for combining the cultural icons they adored, especially that of cultivated innocence. Its tongue-in-cheek existential drift aside, few would have imagined that the Public Service Alliance might find pragmatic use for it in a seminar for shop stewards on how to collect evidence. Derek Lamb, head of the ever-popular and highly acclaimed Animation studio, could feel positively about his animators’ regular nominations for Academy Awards. If animation was the costliest form of film expression, it was also the least dated, in part because its `language’ was international. Lamb was depressed, however, at how the Film Board was scorned by the private sector and parlimentarians. He hoped for a new role, one that would be defined in terms of ` delivering the goods, ‘ that is, making excellent and vitalfilms. What was needed, he said, was someone at the top to inspire the place-someone like the old quarrelsome Scot, John Grierson . The public wanted information about a host of vital subjects and making such films would win back public respect and an audience. It was also important to find a way to bring on young talent.

Lamb had succeeded in the last category when he invited the animation artist Janet Perlman to make Lady Fishbourne’s Complete Guide to Better Table Manners in 1976. This was an exuberant tale of four unusual table guests whose faux pas help the viewer see him/ herself as others might. The film purposely does not deliver on its premise of an `informal little lecture on basic table manners that we know will result in a more fulfilling life. ‘ It mocks such etiquette as ` what to do when something is on the plate which you don’t like by having a parrot jump up from a plate and marchboldly around the table, creating general pandemonium. The film is meant to serve as a classroom provocature to a discussion of etiquette and social mores in general.

From 1976-78, McLaren madeAnimated Motion , a series of five films for students just embarking on a study of animation techniques. In them, McLaren comments upon, demonstrates, and classifies aspects of motion that the animator uses in his daily work. He then turned to the most complex and expensive production of his career, Narcissus, a balletic interpretation of the Greek myth of the youth whose excessive self-love created a void of mental imprisonment. The live-action animation is a compendium of McLaren techniques gleaned from a lifetime of creativity. The project drained him, and his health , long precarious, began to wane permanently. The Narcissus legend symbolized the decade, although when it was finished at last in 1983, McLaren was first to admit it was structurally weak, dragged in the second half, and then dribbed off. He retired in 1984 and spent his last years engrossed in listening to music with his perennial companion Guy Glover. When he died in 1986, the whole of his cinematic art occupied just over three hours of screen time. McLaren’s was an oeuvre which enriched so many lives that its full impact is still incalculable.

Significant Dates and Events

1939. Creation of the NFB in Ottawa. John Grierson becomes the first Govermenr Film Commissioner. 1940. UN du 22 e is the first NFB film shot in french. 1941. Churchill’ s Island is the first Canadian film to win an Oscar Norman McLaren is hired to organize animation at the NFB. 1944. Columbia Pictures and Famous Players show NFB films in French in Quebec movie theaters for the first time. 1949. NFB film broadcast on American and English television stations for the first time. 1951. Production of Royal Journey, the NFB’ s first 35 mm color film. 1955. The NFB moves its offices to the Montreal suburb of Saint-Laurent. 1960. Colin Low directs Universe, which a few years later will be included in NASA’ s training program for astronauts. 1963. The NFB shoots its first feature-length film: Drylanders, a fictionaldrama by Donald Haldane, and Pour la suite du monde ( The Coontrap), a documentary by Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault and Marcel Carriere. 1964. Creation of the French Program Branch. 1966. Creation of the French Animation Studio. 1967. Creation of Challenge for Change/ Societe nouvelle, an experimental film program promoting social change. The NFB produces the experimental film shown at the Labyrinthpavilion; it is visited by more than 1.3 million people during Expo ‘67. First use of computer animation at the NFB. 1969. Adaption of the new NFB logo designed by Georges Beaupre’ and symbolizing a vision of humanity. 1971. Mon Oncle Antoine by Claude Jutra wins the Gold Hugo Award at theChicago International Film Festival and Best Feature Film at theCanadian Film Awards. 1973. Balablok wins the Palm d’ or for best short film at Cannes. 1974. The English program creates Studio D, the first production unit forfilms by, for and about women. The French Program opens regional production centers outside ofQuebec. 1975. The NFB starts transfering films onto 3/4-inch videocassette format and opens several video centers. The NFB opens a library of captioned and subtitled films for the hearing-impaired. The Heat Wave Lasted Four Days, by Douglas Jackson, becomes the first Canadian film sold to American network television. 1976. Work begins on the official film of the XXI Olympic Games. Under the supervision of Jean-Claude Labrecque, 32 crews comprising 168 persons shoot 100,000 meters of film. 1977. J.A. Martin, Photographe triumphs at Cannes. Monique Mercure wins the Palm d’ or for best actress, while the film wins the Ecumenical Award. That same year, it is named Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Awards. 1978. The NFB wins two Oscars: one for best documentary short for Beverly Shaffer’s I’ll find a Way, and one for best animation for Co Hoedeman’s The Castle/Le chateau de sable. 1980. English Production creates the Program to Assist Films in the Private secctor (PAFPS), opening the way to coproduction with the private Sector. Creation of the Federal Women’s Film Program(FWFP). 1983. The report of the Applebaum-Hebert Committee recommends that the NFB continue to produce and distribute films. 1984. Mon Oncle Antoine is declared the best Canadian film of all time at the Torento Festival of Festival. 1985. Creation of Aide au cinemea independant -Canada (ACIC) to assistindependent French-language flmmakers. 1986. A special jury prize is awarded to the NFB by the Nyon international Documentary Film Festival for its exemplary documentary production since 1939. Transtions, the NFB’ s first 3D IMAX film, is seen by 1.7 million visitors at Expo ‘86 in Vancouver. The French Program creates the Regards de femmes program. The French Program Animation Studio establishes a computer animation center.Establishment of the Employment Equity program.

Oscar Won by the NFB

1. Churchill’ s Island, documentary by Stuart Legg, in 1941. 2. Neighbours, animated short by Norman McLaren, in 1952. 3. I’ ll Find a Way, documentary short by Beverly Shaffer, in 1978. 4. The Sand Castle, animated short by Co Hoedeman, in 1978. 5. Special Delivery, animated short by John Weldon and Eunice Macaulay,in 1979. 6. Every Child, animated short by Eugene Fedorenko, in 1980. 7. If You Love This Planet, documentary short by Terre Nash, in 1983. 8. Flamenco at 5:15, documentary short by Cynthia Scott, in1984.