Norman McLaren (Collector's Edition) - DVD
Between his arrival in Canada in 1941 and his death in 1987, Scottish-born animator Norman McLaren ploughed a remarkable 50-film furrow - the most exceptional examples of which are gathered together on this double-disc box set.
For the uninitiated, McLaren specialized in radical short animations, feeding off everyone from Mondrian to the surrealists, and encompassed a huge variety of techniques.
The earliest film here, Boogie-Doodle (1948), is hand-drawn straight on to the film stock, hopping about to a boogiewoogie piano track, while Neighbours, from 1952, offers a complex McLaren style called "pixellation" - the animation of human beings.
But McLaren also prowled the most extreme ends of abstract art - probably the most remarkable film in this collection is Synchromy, from 1971, where McLaren stamped the same block design on the optical and the soundtrack portion of the film stock, so you hear an artificial noise that exactly corresponds with what you see. Sounds weird, but it works brilliantly.
Disc two is Donald McWilliam's 1990 documentary, The Creative Process - a compendium of uncompleted films, interviews, and footage of McLaren hunched over his squiggles. A real must-see all round.